
Class. /i lii ^ TK 

Book. f^:zf^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSED 



FORB HALL NOON LECTURES 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



THE 

LABOR MOVEMENT 

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF 
RELIGIOUS VALUES 



BY 
HARRY r. WARD 

Professor of Social Service, Boston University School of Theology 
Secretary, The Methodist Federation for Social Service 



The verbatim stenographic report of a series of 

noon day lectures 

delivered at 

Ford Hall, Boston, 1915, 

together with the questions and answers of the 

Forum period following each lecture 



mew l^ocft 

STURGIS & WALTON 

COMPANY 

1917 






^^ 



Copyright, 1917, 
By STURGIS & V/ALTON COMPANY 



Set up and clectrotyped. Published, May, 19 IT. 



^ I ^ 



* VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 
BINQHAMTON AND NEW YOU 



m 29 i9l7 

©G1.A467656 



PREFACE 

A School of Theology and the I. W. W. sitting 
together to discuss the labour problem! Can 
any conference more strange to our modern 
thinking be imagined! But could any confer- 
ence more essentially logical be conceived ! The 
bringing together, however, of these various 
groups into one harmonious student body was 
the function of a third idea in action, the Ford 
Hall Open Forum. 

Ford Hall stands for free discussion of ques- 
tions carrying a distinctive ethical message. It is 
in a large way a church for community religion. 
Within its walls every religious, racial and 
political element in the community have come 
together seeking for a faith common to all. 
Therefore, when the Boston University School of 
Theology sought for a place fit and proper for the 
exercise of the hospitality it contemplated, the 
platform of Ford Hall with its associations of the 
Open Forum was the natural place to seek. 

The lectures here reproduced w^ere originally 
presented by Dr. Ward to his students in the 
University. They attracted so much attention 
that a group of ministers asked to have them 



vi PREFACE 

repeated. Thereupon the School of Theology 
issued a general invitation to all to attend the 
course. It stated the aim of the course to be to 
present the broad, essential facts concerning the 
constituent groups of the labour movement in 
the United States, and discuss its main demands 
from the standpoint of religious values. 

The Boston Baptist Social Union gladly opened 
Ford Hall to the meetings, and men of all classes 
and creeds, of all ranks, standards and opinions, 
gathered to listen to an official representative of 
a School of Theology expound the labour move- 
ment. Ministers and laymen, employers and 
employees sat together and asked questions at 
the close of the addresses. The lectures met 
with a warm reception. The resolutions pre- 
sented by the I. W. W. at their close may be taken 
as fairly illustrative of the feeling of the think- 
ing public toward the addresses. It is in re- 
sponse to a very general request for their publi- 
cation that this volume is presented to the public. 
The text is from a verbatim stenographic report, 
with no changes whatever. 

I was privileged to preside at these lectures 
and to conduct the question period. I feel that 
this task was indeed an honour, and I regard it 
as an equal privilege as editor to present this 
volume to the larger public. 

William Horton Foster. 



INTEODUCTION 

Can an interpreter of modern industry come 
out of a theological seminary? An intelligent 
twentieth century citizen would no more expect 
it than did the average man of Jesus' time sup- 
pose that any good thing could come out of Naz- 
areth, But I ought to have taken it for granted 
after my long acquaintance with such seminary 
professors as Eauschenbusch, Fagnani, Mathews, 
Hall, Vedder, Eyan and Eowe. Still I was 
amazed when I witnessed the work of Prof. 
Harry Ward in this remarkable course of lec- 
tures. His range of knowledge, breadth of 
vision, depth of sympathy, unruffled equanimity, 
splendid poise, and remarkable powers of ready 
and accurate speech simply overwhelm me. 
That I myself was not bewitched nor hypnotised 
was attested by the extraordinary response of 
the entire audience that filled Ford Hall, day 
after day. It was a conglomerate crowd of min- 
isters, business and professional men, Socialists, 
Labor Unionists and I. W. W.'s that made up 
that audience. They all seemed to feel very 
much as I did, and yet the labour problem was 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

handled from A to Z without hesitation, no side- 
stepping and unequivocally. 

And this extraordinarily unique situation was 
intensified by the fact that the lecturer was not 
essaying an adventure on his own hook and at 
his own risk, but was speaking as the representa- 
tive of the Theological School of Boston Univer- 
sity in a hall freely given for the purpose by a 
great lay organisation, the Boston Baptist Social 
Union. And, to cap the climax, the National In- 
dustrial Union of Textile Workers of the I. W. 
W. fraternity drafted resolutions expressing 
their appreciation of the whole enterprise and 
especially of Professor Ward. I doubt if the 
like of this has ever been known before. And re- 
member that the audience had the right to ask 
questions after each address and no vague, un- 
certain or unsatisfactory statement could pass 
unchallenged. 

No small measure of the success of this im- 
mensely significant enterprise was due to Mr. 
William Horton Foster, who not only presided 
throughout with great skill, but who also had 
much to do with initiating and carrying forward 
the whole idea. In fact, it was an outgrowth, in 
some ways, of his work as Secretary of the Ford 
Hall Foundation, an organisation given up to 
promoting the Open Forum Movement. 

George W. Coleman. 



Feb. 25, 1915. 

In behalf of the I. W. W. Propaganda League of 
Boston we wish to express our sincere thanks to the 
Baptist Social Union, also to the Boston University 
School of Theology and particularly to Prof. Ward for 
making it possible to present to the people of Boston 
the most vital social problem of the day, namely, the 
Labor Movement. 

We wish to compliment Prof. Ward for the unbi- 
ased, unprejudiced, and able manner in which he pre- 
sented the controversy between capital and labor and 
its causes. 

The viewpoint taken by Prof. Ward coupled with 
his remarkable exposition of the case of labor, we feel 
will meet with the general approval of the organiza- 
tion and its members. 

It has ever been the policy of the I. W. W. and its 
members to regard the conflict between the classes in 
society from the viewpoint of the worker, and we be- 
lieve that Prof. Ward in his course of lectures on the 
labor movement has presented labor's Cause in such a 
clear and analytical manner, that one would be led to 
believe that he had acquired his extensive knowledge 
of the Labor Movement from actual experience in 
Industry. 

We sincerely hope that the course of lectures just 
completed will be published and given as wide a cir- 
culation as possible. 

Committee : 



Signed - 



Adolph Lessig, 
Nathan Herman, 
Guy Curtis, 
,JoHN J. Fraser. 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



I. TEADE UNIONS 

The labour movement is one of the great social 
forces that are making the modern world. It is 
the effort of the wage earners to secure their full 
share in the gains of our industrial civilisation ; 
to secujre also their full share in the control of 
that civilisation. In its present form it has 
three groupings, the trade unions, the socialists, 
and the syndicalists. In this country the pre- 
dominant labour organisation is the trade 
union — which groups the workers according to 
the craft which they follow, around the tools that 
they use. These trade unions are centralised in 
the American Federation of Labor which has ex- 
isted about thirty-three years and comprises now 
about two million members, with about half a 
million other organised workers who are not 
aflaiiated, the principal element in that group be- 
ing the Railroad Brotherhoods. 

The actual strength of the trade union move- 
ment is much greater than its numbered mem- 
bership, because a large proportion of the indus- 

3 



4 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

trial workers who are not in its membership still 
follow its lead. That means that the American 
Federation of Labor has in it about 18 per cent, 
of those available for membership, because it 
operates in only two of the broad divisions of the 
gainfully employed in this country. We have 
something over twenty-nine million gainfully 
employed in this country, in five groups. In 
those two groups where the American Federation 
of Labor operates we have a little over twelve 
million people. Now that membership is gath- 
ered by means of organisers who endeavour to 
persuade first the workers to join the unions. 
Where the trades are organised under the union 
label they endeavour to get the employers to 
adopt the unions, and to persuade the workers to 
use union made goods. Of course the latter 
method is confined to certain trades or goods 
which are consumed by industrial wage earners. 
That membership is gathered without distinc- 
tion of sex, creed or colour, although there is 
about the same discrimination against women 
that there is in the world at large. It reflects 
pretty accurately the general social situation. 
For example, the Ladies' Garment Workers' 
Union, which is the largest women's union, is of- 
ficered practically entirely by men. There has 
been a great increase in the last five years in the 
organisation of women, due largely to the activ- 



TRADE UNIONS 5 

ity of the Women- s Trade Union League, and of 
course a changing sentiment within labour 
circles concerning the activity of women in 
labour affairs. 

The government of the trade union is a differ- 
entiated matter. You have your central Amer- 
ican Federation of Labor with its national oflftces, 
sustained by a per capita tax. You have your 
city and state federations. These deal with mat- 
ters of general interest and general policy. The 
real governmental power is in the national and 
international unions, one hundred and eleven of 
them, which compose the American Federation 
of Labor. They really govern the labour world. 
They have in them some twenty thousand local 
labour unions. In addition there are some six 
hundred and forty which have a charter directly 
from the American Federation of Labor, either 
because there is no international union in that 
trade or because the local workers are not nu- 
merous enough to be organised according to 
trades. 

The American Federation of Labor cannot 
technically be held responsible for the acts of the 
international unions. There is a certain degree 
of moral responsibility, but it would be almost 
as unfair to hold the American Federation of 
Labor responsible for the McNamara crimes as 
it would be to hold the United States responsible 



6 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

for the recent lynchings in Georgia. The local 
unions have very little democratic power; for 
power is centralised, to an extraordinary degree 
almost, in the international unions. They have 
the power of excommunication (and they do ex- 
communicate) and the punishment is, of course, 
that the places of strikers can be filled if need be 
by the international union itself, and there is 
really where its power of control lies and is 
centred. 

In so far as the general policy of trade unions 
is concerned, — their relation to public welfare, — 
whatever may be the defects in this country the 
social gains that have come to us from them are 
considerable. They have stood first of all for 
the protection of the workers, the protection of 
their lives, of their moral and intellectual wel- 
fare. They have been a school of democracy. 
Their influence over the immigrant group in 
training them for American life can scarcely be 
over-estimated. They promote the self-expres- 
sion of labour as opposed on the one hand to phil- 
anthropy and on the other hand to legislation. 
They democratically develop workers themselves 
to pursue the path of their own development. 

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING 

Consider some of the outstanding policies 
which have generally prevailed. The funda- 



TRADE UNIONS 7 

mental policy is collective bargaining. The 
basic contention of the American Federation of 
Labor is that there must be and is a partnership 
between capital and labour, that their mutual 
dependence one upon another creates a joint 
moral obligation, that they must work together 
and that their partnership must be realised 
through collective bargaining, through the power 
of labour to sell its labour and to agree to the 
terms under which it shall work in joint capacity 
through its chosen representatives. There is an 
economic necessity here. Under the concen- 
trated conditions of modern industry, labour of 
course develops side by side a similar concentra- 
tion and the two groups (if business is to be done 
according to the basis of to-day, economically 
speaking) must work together. There must be 
joint action on the part of these two groups. To 
attempt to enforce the right of capital to deal 
to-day with the individual labourer is just about 
as reasonable as to ask labour (or for labour to 
assert the right or the demand) to deal with indi- 
vidual stockholders of an enterprise. Of course 
we have been recently told on the stand in this 
country by the men responsible for some of the 
largest industries that the individual stockhold- 
ers had no responsibility whatever for labour 
conditions. 

There is not only an economic necessity but an 



8 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

ethical necessity here. Labour is not free to-day 
unless it can bargain jointly. That is perfectly 
obvious. It is under the compulsion of hunger 
and of necessity. It does not own its tools; it 
does not own its resources ; it does not otvti the 
things necessary for its work in the large and 
highly organised industries to-day, and ethically 
labour is neither free nor in the attitude or con- 
; dition of Justice unless it has the right to bargain 
\ collectively and jointly, a^ow that is generally 
\ conceded. I suppose it has more opposition in 
these United States than in any other civilised 
country, and that is one of the anomalies of our 
situation, that a country which has developed the 
representative principle in government is yet un- 
der the influence of a belated individualism and 
largely attempts to deny that principle in indus- 
try. And yet the days are changing. The 
principle of collectiye bargaining will largely be 
admitted to-day (perhaps by the majority), al- 
though some folks are still living in the 
eighteenth century and others still live in Col- 
orado. But generally that principle is con- 
ceded. 

It was a remarkable exhibition on the stand be- 
fore the Industrial Commission to see the men 
who have the largest financial interests in this 
country one after another admitting this princi- 
ple, and then one after the other testifying that 



TRADE UNIONS 9 

there had been no attempt in the industries 
which they control to work out the principle and 
to apply it. Now if you admit the right of 
labour to bargain collectively and then refuse to 
have any dealings whatsoever with the collective 
organisation of labour you are giving labour a 
loaf of bread which turns out to be made of stone. 
Of course the collective bargaining may turn out 
to be autocracy on the one side. There has al- 
ways been the possibility of oligarchy when you 
have attempted to organise a republic but that 
has never held our hand from attempting to 
carry through further democratic organisation. 
Men have to face danger and perils as the price 
or risk of progress. But in this day and age to 
refuse to enter into any collective bargaining 
with labour, to admit the principle but decline to 
work out the form of it, is simply to leave the 
whole industrial world in chaos, and to drive it 
into a condition of anarchy, of guerilla warfare, 
which is absolutely unsupportable in our modern 
civilisation. 

THE CLOSED SHOP 

Then comes the policy of the closed shop and 
those who object to collective bargaining object 
to it because it leads to the closed shop. Now 
there are different kinds of a closed shop. 
One is the shop that is closed to organised 



10 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

labour, and that passes before the unsuspecting 
public under the guise of an open shop. It is 
largely promoted by a group of men in this 
country who are interested in maintaining a 
shop that is absolutely closed against organised 
labour. There may be such a thing as an " open 
shop ^' but as an experienced economist and in- 
dustrial observer said to me not long ago, " I am 
still looking for one." They do occur, of course, 
here and there, non-union and union men work- 
ing side by side. The tendency is, however, to 
work one way or the other, to become either a 
non-union shop or a union shop. 

Now the terms non-union and closed shop are 
not necessarily identical. There are two kinds 
of closed shop, one is the shop where whoever 
comes in is required to join a union, and the 
other where no man is taken unless he is a union 
man. For all practical purposes they are identi- 
cal and may be so considered. The fundamental 
thing about the closed shop in judging it is that 
it is a war measure. It is not a policy of organ- 
ised labour nearly as much in Europe as in this 
country. It is not written in trade agreement 
contracts in England as in this country. What 
is the reason? It is in the different attitude of 
the employer and the courts in England. 
Labour has been driven in this country by the 
opposition of employers, by industrial militarism 



TRADE UNIONS 11 

and by the ancient attitude of courts to insist 
more upon the closed shop than it does in Eng- 
land, and the recent decision of the United States 
Supreme Court making constitutional laws by 
which the emj)loyer may discharge men for be- 
longing to a union will have a tendency to ac- 
centuate both the fighting spirit and the fighting 
method. We shall hear more of the closed shop 
because of that decision. 

The closed shop must be judged on two 
grounds, one economic and the other ethical. 
Does it lead to economic efficiency? You will 
have many manufacturers fight it on the grounds 
of inefficiency, asserting that it is absolutely 
inefficient from the standpoint of production. 
Now in the long run this issue will be settled in 
the field of efficiency but it will not be settled 
simply in the field of efficiency from the stand- 
point of the employer alone, not efficiency in pro- 
duction alone; it will be efficiency from the 
standpoint of social welfare, whether the total 
human results are more or less under that sys- 
tem than under any other. 

When you come to the ethical ground, it is 
the question of the degree of compulsion which 
is exercised to secure the closed shop. We feel 
instinctively and naturally, we Americans, that 
a man has the right to control his labour as he 
pleases. We do not always see the anarchical 



1^ THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

implication of that right. We do not always see 
how we have had to limit that right in govern- 
ment and how it will increasingly have to be lim- 
ited in industry. But you must remember if you 
are going to argue that an individual man has 
the right to sell his labour on his own terms, to 
work for whom he pleases and as he pleases, 
then by the same token other men have the right 
to decline to work with him, and if they exer- 
cise that right that simply means the right of 
a certain kind of closed shop. On the other 
side you have compulsion exercised because the 
man who declines to accept union standards is 
lowering the standards of living for the whole 
group and you have compulsion working on both 
sides. When that compulsion becomes actually 
coercion you have an entirely different situation, 
and while on pure grounds of social welfare it 
will be and may be increasingly necessary to ex- 
ercise coercion (we are doing it all the time 
through our labour legislation), the principles of 
ethics and sound government insist that this right 
is a right which belongs to the community as a 
whole. It belongs to the majority and it does 
not belong to any single group in the community. 
The closed shop without the element of coercion, 
brought about by moral suasion which has no 
coercion in it, may be of the highest ethical value 
to the whole community. 



TRADE UNIONS 13 

Then there is the preferential shop, where the 
right of any man to work is recognised but where 
the preference is given to the union man as 
long as his character and.eflflciency is of equal 
grade with the other man (on the ground that 
the union is bearing the burden, is paying the 
bills for improving labour conditions) where he 
is given a preference in employment and where, 
when it comes to discharge, he is given a prefer- 
ence and retained. In other w^ords the right of 
any individual to seek employment is recognised, 
but if he is a non-union man he can only get 
the first preference by showing himself to have 
better efficiency and better character than the 
union man. Usually you get out of the prefer- 
ential shop the union shop because all the peo- 
ple who are there are union people. It naturally 
works out in that way. It has come about by 
a perfectly natural, ethical process because the 
union has been raising its standards and furnish- 
ing the best possible workmen. You have what 
is practically a closed shop without any of the 
coercion measures. 

INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES 

What about industrial disputes? The aver- 
age picture that has until recently prevailed of 
the agent of the union (he used to be the walk- 
ing delegate), the business agent, is that he was 



14 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

a nuisance in the community who stirred up 
trouble, an undesirable citizen because it was his 
chief task to foment strikes. That is a popular 
picture that has prevailed of the union organizer 
until quite recently. Now what are the facts? 
The facts are to-day that the chief business of the 
successful business agent of the union is to pre- 
vent strikes instead of to promote them, because 
labour has learned all too bitterly the cost of war 
methods, and the strike, of course, is a war 
method that belongs to the Stone Age. To-day 
organised labour is much more interested in pre- 
venting strikes than it is in calling them. For 
example, in 1913 organised labour in this coun- 
try settled over three thousand disputes without 
strikes, secured improved conditions in over 
three thousand cases without strikes. Organ- 
ised labour called in that year less than one 
thousand strikes, and of all the strikes in this 
country in that year organised labor had to do 
with between fifty-five and seventy per cent. Or- 
ganised labour is not to be held entirely respon- 
sible for all the strikes. Carroll D. Wright has 
said that 75 per cent, were occasioned because of 
the refusal of employers to arbitrate. In every 
country in the world except England, and 
possibly Australia and New Zealand, in the last 
five years there has been an increase of labour 
difficulties, of industrial disputes, an increase 



TRADE UNIONS 15 

in strikes. This condition has not obtained in 
England because of the fact to which I referred 
some time ago, because the principle of collective 
bargaining and the rights of organised labour are 
recognised more by English employers and Eng- 
lish courts, because organised labour is stronger 
there, because it has secured a greater oppor- 
tunity of political expression, and where it is 
stronger you have fewer strikes. Also we have 
had a tendency to increasingly bitter and violent 
strikes in this country in the last few^ years, but 
it is interesting to note that they occurred in in- 
dustries that are not organised. Some of the bit- 
terest outbreaks in recent years in this country 
have been because the conditions were unbear- 
able. That was true in Lawrence. Now by the 
same token conditions that have obtained in some 
of the mining centres in this country have led to 
action on the part of the local workers against 
the desires and wishes and policy of the national 
organisation, an action that was detrimental 
because it w^as badly planned and came at the 
wrong time. Conditions had become unbearable 
and drove the workers to action. 

INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES 

How are they going to settle disputes? By ar- 
bitration and conciliation? We have organised 
a number of state boards of arbitration which 



16 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

are of very little use. They furnish an orna- 
mental decoration on the statute book, an orna- 
mental (or otherrvdse) office for certain political 
attaches, but they have not proved themselves 
of very much value, partly for the reason that 
they have usually come into the conflict too late. 
You do not stand much chance of arbitrating a 
difficulty when a man has got his fighting blood 
up and is bound to win. That is one reason why 
arbitration boards, that are really political 
boards, fail. 

The same thing is true of unofficial arbitration 
boards because more and more the disputes in 
industry become technical, have technical points. 
If they are to be arbitrated it must be by men 
of technical knowledge, not politicians or benev- 
olent minded men from the general public. The 
tendency of labour is toward arbitration but an 
arbitration which has a technical knowledge of 
the situation, to permanent trade boards in var- 
ious industries. In the Garment Workers' trade 
there has been successful development toward 
that end. The last garment workers' strike in 
Chicago was occasioned first because of the low 
wages, and second, the continual unjust exac- 
tions of the local foreman. Then there was no 
opportunity for collective bargaining, no measure 
by which workers could get their complaints 
before the real owners and managers of the in- 



TRADE UNIONS 17 

dustry. Finally in one of the shops of the west 
side two or three girls went down to the office 
and after getting by the different employees they 
finally got into the sanctum sanctorum of the 
big man himself. He listened very patiently to 
their grievances and told them it must be 
remedied, and be remedied by the foreman con- 
cerned. Then he telephoned to the foreman that 
these things must be changed. But it was too 
late. Those girls were afraid to face the little 
petty tyrant who had been the occasion of their 
going to see the big man, and on the way back 
the strike started that affected afterwards one 
hundred thousand people. Now when the man- 
agers of that industry were told that these 
workers wanted an opportunity for collective 
bargaining they said it could not be done, that 
one simply could not devise any measure for 
permanent joint management in this trade. But 
inside of six months such a measure was devised 
w^hich not only settled that strike but settled 
every other difficulty that arose in that garment 
workers' trade thereafter. And these same 
owners to-day are on record that they do not see 
how they ever got along without a permanent 
trade board to settle such disputes. 

Of course there is the use of the Erdmann Act 
in transportation, but this was used only once in 
the first few years of its existence. Since 1908 it 



18 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

has been used sixty times. When you once estab- 
lish a railroad wage rate it extends over a whole 
system and it is absolutely maintained. All men 
are hired on that basis and that is one reason 
why that kind of arbitration is particularly suc- 
cessful in that industry. But when you come 
down to other industries that deal directly with 
the making of goods, the only real way out of 
continued disputes is to have a joint trade board 
on which the w^orkers are adequately represented 
which can deal with grievances as they arise and 
before they reach the fighting stage. It is prac- 
tically not an arbitration board but a conciliation 
board, a board of justice, the expression again of 
the democratic principle of collective bargaining. 
It is the first expression of it in the industrial 
w^orld. 

The public is tremendously interested in 
getting peace in industry but if the public wants 
to avoid industrial disputes then the public must 
care more for justice (very much more) than 
it cares for peace. And the emphasis must be 
put not on developing arbitration boards to try 
to settle wars after they have started, but on 
securing such proper conditions in industry as 
will remove the causes of war. If the public had 
been interested in seeing that the labour laws in 
Colorado were kept and that conditions were 
right in the Calumet mines the public would not 



TRADE UNIONS 19 

have had to worry itself so much about the situ- 
ation that later developed, and until we, the third 
party to this situation, care a great deal more 
than we now care about securing proper and just 
conditions in industry we shall continually have 
to bear the burdens of recurrent industrial dis- 
putes. 

LIMITATION OF OUTPUT 

The charge is made that the trade union 
cripples the efficiency of individuals and limits 
total production. But we must remember that 
this charge lies also against capital, for capital 
limits production, shuts down to hold up prices, 
closes out factories altogether to maintain a 
monopoly, and has even been known to destroy 
goods in order to hold up prices. The trouble 
is that as long as men are running industry for 
profit and other men are working for profit each 
group is going to endeavour at times to limit out- 
put in order to hold its own self-interest; your 
charge here, your fundamental unethical condi- 
tion, inheres not in either group but in the very 
nature of the present organisation of industry. 
Now labour limits production by limiting the 
hours of work and objecting to the use of 
machines. It advances again the contention 
that these are necessary defence measures, that 
it must defend the employee against destruction 



20 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

from overwork and low wages. And the facts 
justify labour's contention. There are only 
three defences of labour against the pace-maker, 
against the speeding-up process, against a mis- 
guided efficiency that is seeking only short times 
results in immediate production and is not prop- 
erly aware of the dangerous long times results 
in the lives of the worker. One is the good will 
of the human employer; the second, protective 
legislation; and the third, labour's own organ- 
ised power and its own measures. The life of the 
worker must not be used up in the mere making 
of goods. That is a secondary thing. It must 
be made subordinate to the protection and devel- 
opment of the life of the worker out of which 
society itself exists. The sin of limiting produc- 
tion (if there be a sin), inheres in both sides. 
It is unethical to destroy both a man and his 
work and it is unethical to require of a man less 
than his best work. It is destructive of the very 
soul of a man that he should put into his work 
something less than the best, for a man only 
grows at his work unto the full stature of man- 
hood as he puts the very best that is in him into 
the work that he is trying to do. Now when 
you come to limit a man's w^ork, whether or not 
it will be morally destructive of the man depends 
upon the motive for which it is limited. If it is 
limited for social needs, to protect the group 



TRADE UNIONS 21 

from destruction, it is ethical rather than unethi- 
cal. The trouble is, of course, that when men 
are taught that production must be limited (indi- 
vidual production for the good of the whole, as 
a necessary defence measure) that develops 
shirking and loafing. It is simply one evidence 
again of the moral degeneracy that follows after 
a war and war measures. As long as you have 
got a warfare here between the making of profits 
and the protection of the workers you are bound 
to have some moral degeneration follow that 
warfare on the side of both of the participants. 

And what about the effects on society as a 
whole? We are living under a system of pro- 
duction that has been blindly carried forward. 
I go into one community and find thousands out 
of work and in another community find factories 
w^orking night and day. What we have here is 
simply an absolutely blind and unintelligent 
system of production. Over-production under 
that system means unemployment and low wages 
and it means burdens thrown upon the whole 
community. Of course if we had the practical 
knowledge and ethical sense to organise industry 
co-ordinately, to satisfy our needs, we would not 
have over-production and limitation of output. 
But until that day comes labour must protect 
itself, and in doing that it is to a certain extent 
protecting the whole community from the results 



22 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

of the blind process which simply drives on until 
it destroys both the ethical sense and the physical 
power of the w^orker. 

What we have to do in the present situation 
is to strike a mean between the killing of time 
and the killing of men^ between the loafing of 
labour and the driving of capital. And w^hile 
w^e are attempting to find that mean, w^e have also 
got to move on to that better day when we shall 
organise production intelligently and ethically, 
that day when 

" No one shaU work for money, 
And no one shaU work for fame, 
But each for the joy of working," ... 

Towards the coming of that great day 
organised labour is a potent force. When that 
day comes we shall not need trade unions and 
their policy, but until it does come we need them 
very badly. 



TRADE UNIONS 9S 



Q. The speaker spoke about the interest of the 
third party, the public, in strikes. Inasmuch as 
the public is divided up into about 10 per cent, 
capitalists and 90 per cent, workers, is it not a 
mistake to speak about the public as a third 
party? 

A. The classification is not quite correct. 
You have five groups of the gainfully employed 
which comprise practically your public, but even 
some of your capitalists are workers. In these 
groups of the gainfully employed the largest 
single group is the agricultural workers, about 
eleven millions, and then you have got your pro- 
fessional workers, and then you have got your 
domestic workers, so that what you have in your 
industrial disputes to-day is only about twelve 
million, about 7 per cent, of the public. 

Q. Does the speaker believe that the principle 
of the American Federation of Labor, the 
division of interest between capital and labour, 
is an economic fallacy? 

A. I will endeavour to answer that question 
to-morrow. 

Q. Did not the act of the McNamaras prove 
the inefficiency of the trade union to cope with 
the ever increasing power of the capitalist? 

A. I think it proved rather the barbarity of 
the attitude of a certain group of capitalists in 



g4 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

this country towards the efforts of labour to 
find a way out. It was an act of desperation; 
it was the rat in the corner. It did to a certain 
extent show that the trade union had its limit, 
but that was only a part of the proof. 

Q. In a year's time the labour agent handles 
seventy-five disputes but no strike occurs, and at 
the end of the year's time he can show that his 
five hundred men are earning |500 more. Do 
you know of any better method than that of the 
labour agent to settle disputes? 

A. This is the best method under the present 
system of production if it is incorporated in the 
trade agreement but it depends a good deal on 
the personality of the business agent. 

Q. Do* you justify the closed shop on the 
ground of efficiency or on the ground of ethics? 

A. In regard to efficiency I think the predom- 
inant testimony of the manufacturers themselves 
in the highly organised trades proves that it is 
more efficient; otherwise I am quite sure they 
would not go into the agreement and under the 
present system it is more profitable to them. On 
ethical grounds when you are dealing y/ith the 
closed shop under coercive methods it is not ethi- 
cal. No war methods are ethical. But when 
you get a shop which is practically a closed shop, 
where there are all union men working but where 
the door has not been shut by an arbitrary act 



TRADE UNIONS ^5 

of coercion, where the shop is practically closed 
but it does not deny the right of employment to 
any man, you have a highly ethical situation. 

Q. Do you prefer the preferential shop? 

A. In certain situations. 

Q. Is there any tendency on the part of organ- 
ised labour to organise men without trades? 

A. The lecture on Thursday will answer that. 

Q. Do you think that industrial democracy 
will precede or follow political democracy? 

A. The demand for industrial democracy rises 
out of the realisation of the right of political 
democracy. 

Q. What is the use of giving workers indus- 
trial democracy if they have not political democ- 
racy? 

A. They are mutually independent but develop 
side by side. I do not think that question is 
practically before us. We now have a certain 
amount of political democracy. 

Q. What is the objection to the Compulsory 
Arbitration Act? 

A. The objection of labour to the Compulsory 
Arbitration Act, and also to the Canadian one, 
which requires publicity and notification for 
thirty days, and prohibits a strike or lockout 
during that time, is that they apply unequally to 
capital and labour; that capital can avoid the 
consequences of such a law and its actual restric- 



^6 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

tions which labour cannot do. It cannot call a 
strike and labour is placed at a disadvantage 
because capital can practically shut down and 
discharge men. Labour finds itself beaten under 
the enforcement of that act. 

Q. Take an employer that puts in a new 
machine and the man that runs the machine is 
paid $1.50 a day where the man that did the work 
before was paid |4.50. Do you think he is justi- 
fied in putting in a machine that can only 
cheapen the cost of labour without adding to the 
efficiency of men or bettering the work? . 

A. Under the ethics of our present profit mak- 
ing system, of course, he is justified. Socially 
speaking, for it is a social responsibility that we 
can't lay on an individual person, we can't allow 
that thing to be done. 

Q. What good does it do to strike? Since 
1906 wages have gone up but necessities have 
gone up too. 

A. Quite true, but if you had not had the 
efforts of unions you would have a greater dis- 
parity. 

Q. Of what benefit is it to the employer to 
employ union labour, and how does the labour 
union prove that union labour is of benefit to the 
employer? 

A. In this city I know of one ease where the 
agent of a certain union showed employers in a 



TRADE UNIONS 27 

certain trade that they were making for their 
own destruction by the employment of men im- 
properly qualified to do the work, and were 
inaugurating a cut-throat competition. That is 
only one case. 



11. SOCIALISM 

We are considering to-day simply one aspect of 
Socialism, taking it merely as the political ex- 
pression of the labour movement, the attempt on 
the part of the working class to achieve their 
industrial ideals through political action. For 
Socialism claims to be, of course, the working 
class programme in the political field. The first 
question is. To what extent is this claim justi- 
fied? Is Socialism really the programme of the 
working class? The Communist Manifesto, 
which was the declaration of independence of the 
Socialist state, uttered the thrilling slogan, 
" Workers of the World, unite. You have noth- 
ing to lose but your chains.^^ The appeal then 
came from outside the producing group. To 
what extent has it been answered by the working 
class? 

WORKING CLASS PROGRAM 

It is a definite attempt to create a working- 
class consciousness, to develop self-realisation 
and self-expression on the part of the producers. 

But the Socialist should not be allowed to 
suffer under the imputation of attempting to 

2S 



SOCIALISM S9 

create class hatred. No intelligent Socialist 
endeavours to stir up class hatred. Of course 
the doctrine of class consciousness preached by 
ignorant men unfamiliar with Socialist philoso- 
phy may, and undoubtedly does, have a result 
neither intended nor desired by the makers of 
the Socialist programme. There is, however, 
more danger of class hatred and class opposition 
being stirred up by those who would put the 
whole blame for social conditions upon individ- 
ual malefactors, for if that doctrine ever gets 
hold of the working class of this or any other 
country the tendency will be to reach these indi- 
vidual malefactors and the class to which they 
belong with punishment. 

The real object of developing class conscious- 
ness, the real object of the intelligent leaders of 
the Socialist movement, is to secure the abolition 
of all classes, to get the working class to be so 
conscious of the disabilities under which they 
suffer through the class division of society that 
they will not only redeem themselves but redeem 
society forever from any such condition. To 
what extent has there developed a genuine work- 
ing class, that is, a self-conscious working class? 
It is impossible to make an economic grouping 
here. That attempt of early Socialism has of 
necessity been abandoned. There is no such 
rapid division of society into capitalist and pro- 



30 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

letariat as early Socialism foretold. There is no 
such abolition, economically speaking, of the 
middle class as was forecast by early Socialists. 

Economic groups, that is divisions according 
to income, tend more and more to merge. The 
wage earner becomes through the investment of 
his saving (the higher class of wage earner) 
more or less of a small capitalist. It is impos- 
sible to divide the working class from the capi- 
talist class to-day simply on the grounds of pure 
income and economic self-interest. The working 
class to-day instead of being simply an economic 
group is an ethical and psychological group. It 
is a group that thinks in certain terms and has 
certain ideals rather than a group which has a 
certain amount of income, rather than a group 
which is a wage earning group as opposed to a 
capitalist, investing group entirely. 

The leading Socialists are telling us that the 
working class is all those who live entirely by 
their own labour, and then they face the eco- 
nomic fact that I have just referred to, that many 
who live entirely by their own labour are never- 
theless investing some of their surplus funds 
against the future. And so they say the working 
class to-day is all those who live entirely or 
principally by their own labour. But that does 
not appear to be an adequate standard of classi- 
fication. 



SOCIALISM 31 

What about the folks who find themselves 
under our inheritance system living entirely off 
the labour of others and who yet come to see that 
that is unethical^ who find themselves in a posi- 
tion that they wish to disown and yet if they 
should abandon that position and come down 
into the economic producing group they would 
increase competition and tend to make condi- 
tions harder for the group below. They reject 
the principle under which they are living but are 
yet endeavouring to the best of their ability so 
to shape their conduct as to change the whole 
situation. Now there are only a few of these 
people but they belong with the working class. 
They believe in the working class ideals and they 
endeavour to live by them. And so we ought to 
say that the working class to-day are those who 
believe in so organising life that all shall produce 
for the good of society, that none shall take 
anything which they do not create, in value that 
is, of course. 

To what extent has the working class ideal 
captured the labour movement in this country? 
Of course, there has been a mistaken warfare 
back and forth between the leaders of the trade 
union movement and certain of the Socialists, 
which warfare did not exist, and does not exist, 
in Europe to any such extent as here. The 
Socialist movement has had to face the folly of 



S2 THE LABOR MOVE3IEXT 

some of its defects and has liad the bitter oppo- 
sition of most of the leaders of the trade union 
movement in this eonntry. The result is that 
the Socialist group in the American Federation 
of Labor has been able in the last few years to 
show about one- third of the total vote, and 
there they stand. But that does not re^jresent 
theii' strength in the labour movement of this 
country. You have other evidences within the 
labour movement. They have affected it very 
seriously and have modified the attitude of the 
ti'ade union leaders in this country toward polit- 
ical action. Early trade unions in this country 
absolutely disclaimed political action. Under 
the impetus of the Socialist movement this posi- 
tion has been abandoned and the American Fed- 
eration of Labor now takes a political attitude. 
They will support those men who stand for their 
programme politically; and they ^vill at times 
oppose those who do not stand for it. They will, 
of course, support trade union men for public 
office. The evidence of a still further develop- 
ment is the fact that the Washington Federa- 
tion of Labor (that is the State of TVashington 
on the Pacific Coast) has come out absolutely 
in favour not only of candidates who will stand 
for the platform of the labour union but for 
working class candidates. 

There are other evidences of the extent to 



SOCIALISM 33 

which the Socialist movement is spreading 
through the American labour movement. The 
fact is that within the American Federation of 
Labor you can find evidences of working class 
action in the industrial field on the part of those 
who disavow the political movement. Both in 
the Chicago and San Francisco labour bodies 
there have been notable and historic discussions 
over which took priority in the case of industrial 
disputes, labour's obligations to labour or 
labour's obligations to capital; that is, in the 
event of a strike in a certain trade should the 
allied trades keep their contracts with capital or 
should they break them, holding more sacred and 
prior their obligations to fellow labourers. It 
is interesting to note in that discussion and fight 
that prominent Socialist leaders, men of national 
weight and standing, opposed violation of con- 
tract, opposed working class action in the indus- 
trial field to the disregard of its obligation to 
capital ; w^hile, on the other hand, men who advo- 
cated this policy were men who were bitter oppo- 
nents of the Socialist political programme and 
action. 

The Socialist movement purposes in its polit- 
ical action first to realise the immediate demands 
of the trade union movement. It purposes to 
secure them by legislation, as being a quicker 
and a more general process, as being a process 



34 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

which will achieve the results over a larger terri- 
tory in quicker time and will secure support to 
that end from the capitalist group. In that 
endeavour, the Socialists point out the fact that 
other allied forces can be enlisted. They are 
seeking abolition of child labour, the protection 
of women in industry, and proper liberty of 
action for organised labour under the law, — the 
immediate things which organised labour is itself 
fighting for. It may be interesting to note that 
the American Federation of Labor at its last 
session took a distinctly reactionary step in this 
matter and opposed the endeavour to secure the 
eight hour day by legislation. 

Of course the attempt at political action does 
enlist other allied forces. For example, the Fed- 
erated Council of Churches in this country, rep- 
resenting some thirty denominations, of seven- 
teen million people, are on record as being will- 
ing to support legislative measures embodying 
these just demands of labour for proper protec- 
tion and relief from over-work ; and by the same 
token, the organised social workers in this coun- 
try are on record to the same effect, so that you 
have these groups that can be allied along with 
the labour group to secure legislation for its 
immediate advance. 

The Socialist political programme goes very 
much further than that. It is not content to 



SOCIALISM 35 

accept these measures for the immediate im- 
provement of labour as a compromise. They are 
to be simply steps to far more significant 
measures, for Socialism demands not only the 
improvement of improper industrial conditions 
but the reconstruction of the whole industrial 
system around a totally different principle. It 
requires the abolition of the private ownership 
of the means of production and distribution 
through collective ownership and through demo- 
cratic management. It requires the abolition of 
the wage system and the process by which the 
surplus value created by the worker is automat- 
ically appropriated by the capitalist group. It 
requires the organisation of industry around the 
principle of service instead of around the prin- 
ciple of gain. It demands that goods shall be 
made for use and not for profit. This is, of 
course, not a change in the form of organisation 
but in the very spirit and nature of the whole 
industrial procedure, and it demands corre- 
spondingly a similar change in the whole social 
organisation. 

Here you have a significant event in the 
world's history. Here you have the attempt to 
organise both industry and society around the 
ideals of the worker instead of around the ideals 
of the thinker and the fighter. Here you have 
a group, which has never before expressed itself 



Se THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

in history, coming on to the stage of action, and 
it is the group of greatest number, it is the group 
of greatest power — when its power is once 
developed and realised. Such a movement could 
only be possible under democracy; such a pro- 
gramme to realise such a hope could only be 
realised, could only be expressed under a demo- 
cratic system of government. But under that 
system such expression is inevitable. For the 
first time in history the manual worker, the in- 
dustrial worker, has been given a stake in the 
commonwealth, has been given place and oppor- 
tunity in determining the government. For the 
first time in history, that same worker has been 
educated, has been taught to read, has been 
taught to think; therefore, for the first time in 
history his capacities for action have been de- 
veloped, and now those capacities for action are 
going to express themselves. Xothing can stop 
that. The world is not going back from its gains 
in democratic government and universal educa- 
tion. And that being the case, it is inevitable 
that this great group of power, which in past 
ages has been simply the mud-sill over which 
other folk walked to comfort and climbed to 
power, which all through history has been at the 
bottom of the social structure, shall now stand 
upon its feet and take its appointed place in the 
destinies of the race. 



SOCIALISM 37 

Now for those who believe in the ethics of 
Christianity, it ought to be pointed out that one 
of the. great forces that have created both dem- 
ocracy and popular education and have made this 
movement for the development of the working 
class possible has been the force of the principles 
which are embodied in the teachings of Jesus. 
In those teachings there sounded for the first 
time in history, with a voice of universal author- 
ity, and with absolute clearness the long-cher- 
ished but long-unexpressed desires and hopes of 
the workers of all the ages. There spoke a 
worker, not a ruler, not an exploiter. There 
spoke one who worked with his hands and so 
came close to the heart of the great bulk of the 
human race, and also, in so doing, came close to 
the very heart of the Eternal. 

THE INDICTMENT OF CAPITALISM 

To what extent does this programme which 
the working class are forming — and remember 
that it is in the making, it is not formed yet — 
to what extent does this programme involve an 
indictment of capitalism ; and the strongest part 
of the Socialist propaganda in this country has 
been its indictment of capitalism. It is not an 
indictment of the capitalist; that needs to be 
understood. That indictment needs to be made 
sometimes but the Socialists are quite willing to 



38 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

leave that to the law as at present made and 
administered. I think at times that the law 
needs to get a little speeding up process in that 
direction. I think, for example, that the men 
who have recently been speculating in the hunger 
of the race have put themselves beyond the pale 
even of decent capitalist ethics. But the Social- 
ist is not concerned with indicting individual 
capitalists. He believes that they as much as 
anyone else are victims of the system. His 
indictment is against the whole system of indus- 
try as organised on the capitalist basis. 

First we want to understand that the Socialist 
does not simply want to abolish individual own- 
ership of the means of production and distribu- 
tion of the sources of wealth. His contention is 
not simply against individual ownership which, 
of course, centres the resources upon which the 
whole of life depends into a few hands. Against 
such individualistic ownership you might put the 
term collectivism, and you could have collectiv- 
ism without Socialism. You might have a form 
of state ownership which would abolish individ- 
ual ownership of the means of production and 
distribution but which would be nothing else but 
state capitalism. Xot a little of the state Social- 
ism of Europe is nothing other than state capi- 
talism, both ownership and the capitalistic prin- 
ciple being transferred to the state collectively. 



SOCIALISM 39 

Something more is involved in capitalism than 
individual ownership of the means of life. It is 
the carrying on of industry for the mere piling 
up of economic wealth, for the mere increase of 
capital, the mere making of goods — for the sake 
of having goods and getting profit out of them. 
That is the fundamental sin in the capitalist 
organisation of industry. The development of 
human life, the great, vital interests of human 
welfare are made secondary to the production of 
goods. The increase of capital is the goal of the 
system. 

Now what indictment does Socialism bring 
against such a system of the carrying on of in- 
dustry, the making of goods for the sake of 
profit and increase of wealth rather than that 
goods should serve human life and develop the 
highest values of human life? And Socialism is 
not alone in its indictment of capital. If you 
will read what Professor Brooks Adams, of this 
city, says in his "Theory of Social Revolutions,'^ 
you will find as severe an indictment of the 
efficiency of the capitalist system of industry as 
could have been penned. If you will read ^' Be- 
tween Eras '^ by Professor Small of the Univer- 
sity of Chicago, you will find a most scathing 
moral indictment of capitalism, and both of these 
come from non-socialist sources. The burden of 
their testimony is, that while capitalism has ful- 



■ 40 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

filled a necessary part in human development, 
and while its contribution to the human race has 
been extremely significant, while we are all in- 
debted to it for many things, it has now become 
an outworn process, inadequate to meet the needs 
of the present; that it is like one of its old 
machines that needs to be put in the scrap heap, 
to give place to a more intelligent and more 
efficient method of doing the world's work. 

Now it would be well for us, big capitalists and 
small capitalists, middle-class, professional men 
and workers, if we could look at that testimony 
dispassionately, considering it as an indictment 
of a system and not of persons; if we could 
separate the personal element and face that 
situation on economic and ethical grounds, on 
the basis of industrial and social efficiency. 
For that is the part of the indictment, that the 
capitalist system no longer fulfils its own cher- 
ished ideal of efficiency; that it is no longer 
adequate to do the work of the world properly; 
that under its competitive organisation we are 
securing a break-down both in the process of 
production and the process of distribution; that 
production is not adequately handled to meet the 
needs of the world to-day; that we have contin- 
ued cycles of prosperity and depression, of over- 
production and under-production, of good times 
and hard times, of panics with all that they infer 



SOCIALISM 41 

in unemployment and uncertainty, even to the 
capitalist group. 

The evidence for that of course lies with 
economists, but the man in the street can see how 
the system j)ractically breaks down, especially 
if he be a man who travels about the country. 
He will find in one place an abundance of goods, 
in another place a scarcity, in one place over- 
employment and in another under-employment. 
He will find the produce of the fields and 
orchards rotting on the ground and being thrown 
into the sea at the ports in some sections, and in 
other places he will find folks going hungry and 
still others finding their incomes pressing ever 
closer on the high cost of living. He will see 
the enormous waste involved in the present 
anarchistic method of distribution. 

Some one with a brain for figures and an im- 
agination has computed that the total waste of 
our present method of doing industry and busi- 
ness amounts to six thousand dollars a year for 
every family in the United States. That may be 
rather high but there is enough waste going on 
to relieve all the hardship of the world. In the 
face of a surplus production of food stuffs taking 
the world over, in spite of the fact that we have 
produced one and a half times more food than 
will feed the world in comfort, we have whole 
races living on the verge of starvation. That is 



4^ THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

an indication that our present method of produc- 
tion and distribution is no longer adequate, that 
it is not measuring up to the present intellectual 
progress of the race. For the fact that we real- 
ise the inefficiency shows that we have sufficient 
intellectual capacity now to meet the situation. 
To-day by social knowledge socially acquired and 
social labour socially exercised, we conquer 
nature, in both the products of the soil and in 
disease, and still millions starve and die. To- 
day by social knowledge socially acquired and 
socially exercised we avert the disasters of the 
waters and the disasters of contagion and still 
we have our thousands stalking up and down our 
streets in unemployment. If you need any more 
testimony than mine and that of thousands of 
others concerning the inefficiency of the capital- 
istic system of industry to meet the needs of this 
modern world, take the testimony of one of its 
own high priests. Certainly the head of the steel 
trust in this country is entitled to speak with 
respect on this question and the most significant 
thing I have seen in the American press in the 
last few years was Mr. Gary's admission when 
he faced the situation of unemployment in New 
York as chairman of the committee there, that 
the whole unemployment situation in this coun- 
try was an evidence of bad management. It is 
a social gain to have that admission. 



SOCIALISM 43 

But when you come to face the moral situation, 
the question is more significant still. There are 
both economists and industrial leaders who tell 
us that the present inefficiency of the capitalistic 
system is not due to any inherent defect, but sim- 
ply due to some minor mal-adjustments, that the 
machine can still be cranked up and made to run 
to meet the needs of the race. That will depend 
upon whether there is any fundamental moral 
quality lacking, for you need something more 
than efficiency and science to meet the needs of 
this modern world. You cannot organise the 
business of the world to-day to meet the demands 
of the intellect and the consciousness of the 
modern world unless you have certain moral 
qualities in your system to begin with. And the 
severest indictment against the capitalistic 
system is on moral grounds. We must all admit 
that certain moral qualities have been developed 
and strengthened in the business and industrial 
world by the capitalist methods of management, 
that we have developed in certain aspects mutual 
faith and trust and dependency. We have de- 
veloped a certain amount of reliance upon men's 
words, of co-operation up to a certain point but 
over against that you have to put other factors. 
You have to put the revelations that have been 
made in court after court and to commission 
after commission in the last twenty-five years of 



44 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

the extreme corruption in the order of the present 
business world, due to all kinds of graft, due to 
the drive of the profit motive, so that men who 
would be perfectly honest man to man, whose 
word man to man would be as good as their bond 
any day (and that is a social gain due to capi- 
talism), men of whom that could be said, would 
yet corrupt their fellow men and plunder the 
common people remorselessly. Evidences of the 
corruption of departments of the United States 
government, evidences of an organised plan 
subtly to control Congress and the courts, evi- 
dence of wholesale attempts to disrupt the labour 
movement by bribery and corruption — these 
are not charges but proven facts that lie at the 
door of capitalism to-day. 

And after that, its reckless waste of human 
life; and after its reckless waste of human life 
in the making of goods, its reckless destruction 
of the moral nature of man, its exhaustion of the 
spiritual energies of whole groups of men by 
industry carried to the point of fatigue, by in- 
dustry failing to furnish even the proper means 
for physical nourishment and so leaving life 
depleted and almost helpless! You have only 
to read the testimony of the investigators in 
Pittsburgh and other steel towns to see what the 
most perfect capitalistic machine has done in the 



SOCIALISM 45 

waste of tlie physical and moral resources of 
whole groups of the population. 

After that tale has been told there lies the 
other story, and that is the tale of the stirring of 
the spirit of hatred and bitterness and passion 
and resentment that comes as men become aware 
of this process. And you simply have all the 
hate and hell of war transferred from militarism 
over into the industrial system as long as it is 
run by capital alone for the gains that chiefly 
come to capital. And that is the end of the 
story, because when you have capitalism in its 
finest form, when it is honest and pure and good 
it still leaves an unanswerable moral question in 
the consciousness of those same good people. 
Bead what Small puts into the lips of the college 
girl who finds herself inheriting a great fortune 
but cannot understand what moral right she has 
to it and how she shall use it to meet the question 
of injustice that lies in her mind. That question 
lies at the very heart of the system and is being 
faced to-day by folks who are beyond reproach in 
the circles of capitalism. 

And for that question capitalism itself has no 
answer. I took up my morning paper and I read 
that after the management of the New Haven 
Railroad has looted New England to the limit, 
because the loot has been distributed into inno- 



46 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

cent hands, nothing can be done. The Commis- 
sion says nothing can be done concerning it and 
the papers say nothing can be done because they 
approach it with the capitalistic mind. But 
when you approach it from the mind which does 
not insist upon the maintenance of the capital- 
istic system of industry you ask why the people 
w^ho have got the major part of the loot — w^ho 
have got the money that innocent investors paid 
to them — you ask why they cannot be reached 
and the unholy tribute returned back to the pub- 
lic again. Of course if New England is going to 
contribute perpetually a tax upon the life and 
labour of its people to the estates of great finan- 
ciers, why nothing can be done. And then to 
justify such a system men blasphemously have 
talked about some of the most sacred teachings 
of the Christian religion, being quite willing that 
others should bear the burden for their sins 
perpetually. 

COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP 

Now to remedy this condition Socialism pro- 
poses collective ownership. The later Socialists 
admit that there are many forms of industry 
w^hich must still remain in private hands for a 
long time to come. If you ask what it means 
that the people should collectively own and 
administer those things upon which the people 



SOCIALISM 47 

depend, they will tell you it means taking over 
immediately the means of transportation and 
communication and then some of the great 
monopolies. They are willing to leave the rest 
to natural and lawful social development. They 
insist that we face a great world-wide movement 
here that never reverses itself, that we continue 
to extend our collective administration all over 
the country, to the taking over of the Alaskan 
railways and mines. The point is not to worry 
about where to stop but to seize upon the next 
step, according to your modern philosopher- 
Socialist. 

Is that a panacea? Will it do what Socialism 
wants done? Will it restore to the people the 
whole product of their labour? Will not simple 
collectivism be merely another form of capital- 
ism, with labour required to produce the un- 
earned increment for those who hold the underly- 
ing securities? Will it relieve the moral aspect 
of the situation or are we face to face here with 
something that is deeper than any form of indus- 
trial organisation, that lies rather in human 
nature than in any principle of social organisa- 
tion? Are we face to face here with something 
which cannot be met by any change in the social 
organisation? You might have state capitalism, 
or even the absolute co-operative ownership of 
the means of life with all the results of the com- 



48 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

mon labour accruing to the people, and if the 
motive was simply production of goods your 
moral distress would be just the same as now, be- 
cause your fundamental principle would not have 
been changed. The fundamental evil is taking 
and using and producing goods for the mere sake 
of material gain and material pleasure, and 
unless you can eliminate that you simply face 
moral disaster under any system that the world 
can devise. Organise collectively and co-oper- 
atively and you put the balance on the side of 
labour's ideal, but you do not automatically 
secure it. You simply put the weight on the side 
of man^s idealism, on the side of his spiritual 
nature. You cannot automatically produce the 
great ideals men have longed for through all the 
ages. 

In addition to collective OTVTiership you need 
two other things. The first is, a spiritual con- 
ception — an idealistic conception — of prop- 
erty, so that property shall be seen to be sacred, 
not because somebody happens to own it and 
their right must be protected, but because on the 
one hand it embodies the great energies of man 
and the great energies of the Divine which have 
gone into its production, and because on the 
other hand it can contribute to the highest 
development of man and be made the servant of 
his spiritual capacities. Along with that you 



SOCIALISM 49 

must have the spirit and ideal of service so that 
men will bend their necks beneath the yoke of 
toil, the common burden of the world's work, 
neither for their own honour nor comfort, but 
will perform their due part in the work of the 
world as servants of the common good. Without 
that spirit of service, without that devotion to 
the ideal which belongs to the artists and to the 
prophets and to the martyrs, and which now 
becomes the sacred right and the divine heritage 
of the common toilers, without that your co- 
operative commonwealth will be a vain delusion. 
But with that your co-operative commonwealth 
is identical with the Kingdom of God which 
Jesus taught. 



50 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. In the interim of the socialistic ideal what 
would the speaker do if he were left a million 
dollars? 

A. I would try to rid myself of the incum- 
brance as quickly as possible, but I would do it, 
as one of our American millionaires said, to the 
best of my judgment to destroy the system under 
w^hich it was made. 

Q. In w^hat way does the programme of 
modern Socialism diflEer from the Marxian pro- 
gramme? 

A. The modern Socialist is much more of a 
philosopher than Marx was. Taking him in the 
group he is not so much of a materialist or fatal- 
ist. He believes much more than Marx did in 
the conscious working out of the social goal. 

Q. You said you must separate the personal 
question from the impersonal one. How can 
there be a moral question involved if the per- 
sonal element is not predominant? 

A. There are group moral questions in w^hich 
persons are involved for which no person is or 
can be alone responsible. He is responsible for 
his part toward the changing of any system that 
he regards as unethical, and that is as far as his 
responsibility goes, and you cannot hold him for 
not breaking away from a condition he cannot 
control. 



SOCIALISM 51 

Q. Why do not those who claim to be sympa- 
thetic to Socialism and support it with their 
money come out plainly and say they are Social- 
ists? 

A. I should think that if there is any truth 
in the phrase, '' Money talks/' that is what they 
are doing. 

Q. Is not such an industry as the Ford a good 
illustration of absolute co-operation along So- 
cialist lines? 

A. I shall deal with the question of profit 
sharing in a later lecture. 

Q. The claim is made that Socialism only ap- 
peals to manual labour and not to intellectual. 
Is this so? 

A. While regretting the fact, I have not yet 
found any way of getting intelligence into the 
heads of some people. It simply cannot be done. 
Socialism has never made that distinction which 
some of its opponents have put into its mouth. 
It recognises the contribution of all groups of 
active workers toward social progress. 

Q. Why is it that Christianity is monopolised 
by capitalists, at least, very few churches oppose 
the capitalistic system. 

A. Because the significance of Jesus^ teach- 
ing on property was obscured for a great pro- 
portion of Christians by Koman and Grecian 
influences in the early development of Christian- 



52 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

ity and turned into theological and doctrinal 
channels. It is getting out of them now. 

Q. Is only manual labour recognised by the So- 
cialist? 

A. The Socialist recognises all kinds of labour 
that contributes to social progress and social de- 
velopment. 

Q. Have the arguments against Socialism 
based upon religion any foundation? 

A, There have been individual Socialists who 
were very bitter antagonists of organised reli- 
gion. Aside from that these attacks have no 
logical and no ethical basis. 

Q. Does Socialism tend to destroy the family? 

A. That is another of those ancient lies that 
still linger. The only basis for it is that some in- 
dividual Socialists have been opposed to the fam- 
ily in its present form, but Socialism as a whole 
makes for the purification and freedom of the 
family. 

Q. Under Socialism would not social service 
be more efficient and more in keeping than under 
the present system of capitalism? 

A. One of the greatest crimes and charges that 
lie at the door of the present industrial system 
is that it makes men worse than they naturally 
would be because they are compelled to produce 
dividends. 



SOCIALISM 53 

Q. If the Socialists would have the govern- 
ment take over the means of transportation and 
communication what becomes of the other work- 
ers? 

A. I expect they would want to get their turn 
as soon as they could. 

Q. How can you reconcile the doctrine of eco- 
nomic determinism and freedom of the will? 

A. Because it shows man where to apply his 
spiritual powers, namely, to the transformation 
of the economic system. 

Q. In view of the inefllciency now going on in 
some public departments how can you assure us 
that greater efficiency will result from Social- 
ism? 

A. We shall have to stand some inefficiency. 
That is part of the price of progress. I would 
rather have some kinds of inefficiency than oth- 
ers, and I would rather have my mail a little 
late and know that no mail carrier is working 
over time. As we gain in social capacity ineffi- 
ciency disappears. 

Q. Instead of taking over only the means of 
transportation and communication would not it 
be just as easy to take over everything? In other 
words would it not be just as easy to take a whole 
loaf as half? 

A. It is just as easy to stand for a great deal 



54 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

more, but the point is you can practically pro- 
ceed only in one way, and that is gain your social 
efficiency as you go along. 

Q. Will you give the names of one or two of 
the best books on the subject of labour? 

A. ^^American Trade Unions/' by Marot; ^''His- 
tory and Problems of Organised Labor/' by Carle- 
ton, a sympathetic study from the outside. 

Q. Will you please give the names of some 
books on Socialism? 

A. " History of Socialism/' the revised edition ; 
"Facts of Socialism/' by Hughan, and the 
" Spiritual Significance of Socialism/' by Spargo. 



III. SYNDICALISM 

The latest development in the labour movement 
is Syndicalism. It comes from France, that su- 
preme mother of revolutions. In France it ap- 
pears to have spent its force. It is still strong 
in the other Latin countries of Europe, perhaps 
because of the temperament of the people and 
perhaps because of the backward state of indus- 
try in those countries. The name originally 
meant nothing more than trade unionism, but 
recently, in the last twenty years, it has come 
to mean revolutionary unionism. One of its So- 
cialist critics says that it comprises Socialist 
philososphy, united with anarchistic ideals and 
trade union weapons. 

Syndicalism proposes to solidify the workers 
by industries, and to use all the weapons of 
trade unions to the utmost to accomplish an end 
which trade unions do not seek to accomplish — 
the transformation of the present industrial sys- 
tem and also of the present organisation of so- 
ciety. So far it agrees with socialism. But it 
parts company with socialism because it dis- 
trusts and disavows political methods, and will 
have nothing to do with the political state, pro- 

55 



66 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

posing to act purely in the economic field and to 
accomplish an industrial in the place of a po- 
litical state. 

It has developed a philosophy. On the prac- 
tical side it is the refuge of those who have be- 
come disappointed and disillusioned, both in the 
Trade Union Movement and in the Socialist 
party. But it has gathered around it in Eu- 
rope, a group of intellectuals who have expressed 
its point of view in a philosophy — the philoso- 
phy of pure intuition — claiming not a little 
support from Bergson, and teaching the work- 
ing class to distrust the intellectuals, believing 
that the intuitions and desires of the workers 
themselves will lead to a much more effective pro- 
gramme than the plans of the theories of the 
thinkers. It claims, in the mouth of this group 
of philosophers, to be something more than a 
philosophy, to be a religion, because of the ex- 
tent to which it masses together large numbers 
of men behind the ideal of a better and a higher 
life, and unites them behind that ideal with a 
passion for service to the extent of sacrifice. 

INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM 

Now before considering the American form of 
Syndicalism, it ought to be noted that there is 
a tendency in that direction inside the Ameri- 
can Federation of Labor in this country. That 



SYNDICALISM 57 

tendency goes under the head of Industrial Un- 
ionism, which is the organisation of the workers 
around the product instead of around the tool, 
following not craft lines but following the di- 
visions which capital has made in the modern 
industrial process. To organise the workers by 
the industry instead of by the trade or the craft, 
would oppose to the concentration of capital the 
concentration of labour. It would avoid the 
weakening effect of jurisdictional disputes, which 
leaves labour fighting against itself in certain in- 
dustries in times of strike, w^hich not only dis- 
gusts the general public but which also weakens 
craft unionism. In some trades, there are rival 
organisations, each claiming to dominate the 
workers. 

Industrial Unionism, how^ever, has not always 
succeeded in avoiding jurisdictional disputes. 
Indeed, it has developed quite a few^ in organised 
labour. The two great groups organised indus- 
trially are the miners and the brewery workers. 
One of the latest jurisdictional fights arose out 
of the fact that owing to the success of the pro- 
hibition movement some of the breweries have 
gone into the business of producing mineral 
waters, and the brewery workers' union claimed 
jurisdiction over the men driving the mineral 
water wagons. This claim led to a conflict with 
the union of another trade, and incidentally 



58 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

raised tlie question. '' When is a brewery not a 
brewery? " 

Besides, these industrial unions have an 
anarchistic tendency in the labour world because 
they have a frankly revolutionary aim and pur- 
pose; that is, they are not content to modify the 
existing system, but propose to transform it, — 
of course by political means, not by weapons and 
violence. That is very clear, both with the 
brewery workers and the miners. The preamble 
to the Constitution of the United Mine Workers 
sets forth that their goal is to secure for the 
workers the full social value of their product. 

While they have this tendency, however, the 
industrial unions part company with the Syndi- 
calists because they trust to political means. 
They are allied with the socialist group rather 
than with the group of the industrial workers 
organised for direct industrial action. 

This group of industrial unionists has ex- 
tended itself, and has influenced labour in other 
directions. In order to meet the demand the 
A. F. of L. has created departments, with the 
effort to amalgamate groups of trades. Concen- 
tration of trades has developed within those 
departments — in the metal trades it has pro- 
ceeded to a very marked degree. There have 
been efforts made also in the direction of feder- 
ation of unions, a most noted example being in 



SYNDICALISM 59 

the railroad workers, where we have a federation 
of all mechanical workers to meet the federation 
of the lines themselves. It has also been pro- 
posed and sanctioned that there should be a 
federation of federations so as to meet the con- 
centrated management of the railroads with the 
concentrated organisation of all the workers. 
This was attempted once before in this country, 
in 1894. 

These tendencies within the American Feder- 
ation of Labor all indicate that the type of labour 
union for the future will be the industrial type. 
There are two great forces working in that direc- 
tion; one, the improvement of machinery which 
makes labour increasingly automatic and wipes 
out the old craftsman and therefore removes the 
necessity for the craft union ; the other being the 
increased concentration of capital, and of the 
management of industry, which forces increasing 
solidarity of labour. 

THE I. w, w. 

The American expression of Syndicalism is the 
I. W. W., that feared, hated, misunderstood, mis- 
represented, and outlawed organisation. It is 
the stormy petrel of the American labour move- 
ment. Wherever there is any kind of a fight to 
be waged in behalf of the folks at the bottom, the 
I. W. W. is more than willing to wage it. When- 



60 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

ever there are heads to be broken, its heads are 
cheerfully and gallantly offered. It has to en- 
dure to-day the same kind of obliquy, the same 
misrepresentation that attended trade unionism 
in its early days, and socialism in its beginning. 

There is evidence beyond the shadoAV of a doubt 
that Syndicalism in Europe was started by the 
group of militant anarchists in France, who 
were persecuted by the police and mercilessly 
hunted down, they attempted in vain to estab- 
lish relations with the socialist groups. Finding 
there was no possibility of opening up again that 
long warfare w^hich had been w^aging in Europe 
between socialists and anarchists, they turned to 
the trade unions for refuge. They w^ent into 
them and captured a section of them with their 
policies and their programme. In comparison 
with that, in this country the most militant and 
successful leader of the I. W. W. came out of that 
early strike in Colorado, 1903-4, when certain 
corporations appropriated for their own use both 
the civil and the military powers of the State, 
when their agents over-ruled the courts by force, 
and publicly consigned the Constitution to hell. 

There are a lot of people interested in this 
country in repressing the I. W. W. They 
ought to note this fact, that the growth of 
the I. W. W. proceeds in direct ratio to the policy 
of repression. Whenever trade union organisa- 



SYNDICALISM 61 

tion is denied by capital, the next move of labour 
is to seek political expression. Whenever trade 
union activity is limited there you will find 
socialism increasing its vote. Where political 
activity is not entered into, where it is checked 
or repressed, or wherever working folks are not 
naturalised, there you find industrial activity 
growing by leaps and bounds. Those folks who 
are trying to hold back the flood of discontent, 
might well remember what has happened in the 
past to those who attempted to do that thing by 
the mere policy of repression. They might, as 
they look around them, remember also what 
happens to people who try to sit too long on a 
safety valve. 

The I. W. W. claims a membership of 120,000 
members; it had a paid-up membership in 1913 
of about 30,000. It proposes to organise the 
workers into one big union with certain national 
departments; operating in three fields at 
present, — textile workers, forest and lumber 
workers, marine and transportation workers. 
It has about ninety-five local unions scattered 
around, including farm workers and construc- 
tion hands. It operates in the unskilled immi- 
grant group at the bottom, and in the group of 
nomads created by the abnormal conditions of 
our seasonal trades. Besides this, it is the Cave 
of Adullam of the modern working world, to 



62 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

wMch gather all those who find themselves out- 
cast and many of those who believe themselves 
outlawed. It is the mouthpiece of discontent. 
It gathers to itself naturally the most radical 
among the Socialists. It has practically cap- 
tured what was formerly the high-brow Socialist 
magazine of this country^ if not for its organisa- 
tion, at least for a pretty broad part of its poli- 
cies and its programme. 

The I. W. W. has a four-fold fight on its hands 
and whatever may be thought of the nature of its 
cause, the gallantry of its struggle against odds 
is worthy of a moment's admiration. Not con- 
tent with finding itself arrayed against the or- 
ganised forces of the community, not content 
with finding itself arrayed against the law, the 
pulpit and the press, it has forced a fight in the 
ranks of labour itself. For in the beginning it 
flung down the gauntlet before both the American 
Federation of Labor and the Socialist Party. 
That three-cornered warfare is being waged with 
bitterness and vituperation and with such epi- 
thets and invectives as would do credit even to 
theological disputes. 

It ought to be said in passing, however, that 
the strength of the I. W. W. cannot be deter- 
mined by its membership. It operates, you 
notice, among a group of workers many of whom 
do not stay in one place very long and do not 



SYNDICALISM 63 

receive very much of an income and therefore do 
not always keep their cards properly paid up. 
Its strength may be more properly determined by 
the number of enemies it has made^ and its 
strength will be determined in the long run not 
by the numbers it gathers together or the organ- 
ising value of its ideals^ but by the contribution 
it will leave upon the labour movement of the 
world in change of form and modification of 
policy. 

The I. W. W. started out to challenge the craft 
union of this country. In Europe that chal- 
lenge was not so direct. There Syndicalism 
started out under the old craft union but 
changed it. Here in America it proclaimed that 
craft organisation spelled for the worker divi- 
sion, defeat, and degeneration. Here it was a 
direct warfare. The preamble to the constitu- 
tion of the I. W. W. points out three defects in 
the kind of union promoted by the American 
Federation of Labor : ( 1 ) , that it does not offer 
effective resistance to the solidarity of capital; 
(2), it weakens labour by internal warfare be- 
cause often in the ordinary strike and always 
in the jurisdictional strike labour finds itself 
fighting against itself; (3), it teaches the 
worker that the interest of the worker and the 
capitalist are identical and so leads the worker 
into submission. 



64 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

To remedy the first two defects the I. W. W. 
propose to solidify all labour. They propose to 
hold the workers together by industries accord- 
ing to the product turned out and the work done. 
They propose to unite these groups in various 
industries in one big union with low fees to 
which all shall be welcome. And this great note 
of solidarity is the dominant note with which 
the industrial union proposes to replace the craft 
union. Here we have a note that needs to be 
heard. It is distinctly a voice for the group 
that is down below the skilled craft organisation 
with its benefits, down below the possibility of 
political action. The I. W. W. is the friend and 
the champion of the unskilled immigrant, the 
outcast and the outlaw, and if it has done noth- 
ing else it is at least performing a valuable social 
service in making the rest of us see the needs 
and conditions of this group at the bottom. In 
becoming the mouthpiece for them, that they 
may let the world know the conditions under 
which they work and live, obviously the only 
answer which any intelligent and just com- 
munity can make to an attempt to repress the 
voice from the bottom, is to insist that that voice 
must be heard no matter what the terms of its 
speech, because only so can we find out what the 
facts are and what action to take in order to 
meet injustice if it exists. 



SYNDICALISM 65 

Of course the ideal of solidarity is one of the 
great moving ideals of the race, one of the ideals 
which becomes a great force in the driving up- 
ward and onward of humanity, and I must con- 
fess that in the presence of that ideal I feel some- 
thing of admiration of those folks at the bottom 
who, in the face of all the forces that are driving 
them apart, still would come together and hold 
up before the world one of the greatest ideals 
that the human mind has ever conceived. Those 
of us here who have been schooled at the feet of 
the Carpenter will recognise at once that this 
ideal of the solidarity of the human race is our 
ideal, and that some practical expression must 
be found for it, not merely in sentiment, not 
merely in emotion, but in the actual working 
world. I must confess to being moved at one lit- 
tle thing that occurred out here at the Lawrence 
strike beyond any thijQg else that happened there. 
It was the group of immigrant women of many 
diverse nationalities, sitting around the common 
table to peel the potatoes for the common meal, 
and singing, in their varied tongues, as they did 
this necessary work, the great hymn of the work- 
ing class of the world, with that chorus : 

" 'Tis the last great conflict, 

Let each stand in his place, 
The Industrial Union 

(or the Brotherhood in the Workers, or 



66 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

the Brotherhood of men — some of the 
different phrases for it) 
The Brotherhood of the Workers, 
Shall be the human race." 

Whatever the defects of the organisation, when 
it can take the people of narrow, contracted, igno- 
rant lives, lift them up out of that narrowness, 
and that sordidness, lift them up, put them in 
touch with the great world of all humanity, and 
give them a vision and an ideal like that, it is 
performing a service to society that needs to be 
done. 

Now when you come to the other part of the 
propaganda of the I. W. W. you have something 
very different. It stands out in clear distinction 
from the American Federation of Labor by its 
insistence of warfare between the worker and the 
employer. Its declaration of independence is a 
declaration of war. The preamble to its consti- 
tution says the working class and the employing 
class have nothing in common. There can be 
no peace as long as hunger and cold are found 
among the people. A few classes have all the 
good things of life. Between these two classes 
struggle must go on until the workers organise 
as a class, take possession of the machinery of 
production and abolish the wage system. It 
proposes to make war upon the enemy wherever 
and whenever he may be found. It will strike 



SYNDICALISM 67 

whenever it can to advantage, and go back to 
work and strike again, whenever by striking it 
will gain anything for the working class. It 
will write no contracts with the employer be- 
cause contracts at best mean a compromise and 
a form of truce, and it believes in unending war- 
fare by all possible methods except the method of 
open violence. It declares that it will harass 
the employer by all possible means in its power 
in order to make gains for labour. Here, of 
course, you have the tactics of militarism, and 
the tactics of militarism always involve the 
ethics of militarism ; and both the tactics and the 
ethics of militarism involve as serious conse- 
quences for those who use them as for those 
against whom they are employed. 

This frankly revolutionary note in the I. W. 
W. propaganda that distinguishes it both from 
trade unionism and from Socialism, is based 
upon two propositions which are not absolutely 
sound. One is the proposition that all wealth 
belongs to the workers; because they made it. 
That of course depends upon how large is your 
definition of the worker. What we have here is a 
popular teaching of Marx' famous doctrine, that 
capital contributes nothing to the production of 
new goods, simply passes over its own exchange 
value. But the fallacy that lurks there, and is 
now being propagated all over this country, is the 



68 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

failure to observe the difference between capital 
and the capitalists. The capitalist when he par- 
ticipates in the process of production^ does con- 
tribute something to it. And therefore the 
wealth created in the world is not all created by 
folks working for wages. If you are going to 
predicate your tactics on the basis of fallacies, 
your tactics of course, will be fundamentally un- 
just. 

The next fundamental fallacy here, or half- 
truth, is in the proposition that the working class 
and the employing class have nothing in com- 
mon. It may be quite true that there is an eco- 
nomic fallacy underlying the proposition of the 
trade union that there is an identity of interest 
between the employing class and the employed, 
but it does not follow that they have nothing in 
common. There is a clear failure here to dis- 
tinguish between the employer as an individual 
and the employer as a social institution in the 
capitalist system. If you are talking imper- 
sonally about employers, about capitalists as a 
social institution, it is of course a sound economic 
idea that there is absolute antagonism of interest 
between that impersonal employing group and 
the wage earning group, because one's economic 
interest is to increase goods and profit and to 
reduce labour cost, and the other's economic 
interest is to push up labour cost by every means 



SYNDICALISM 69 

in its power, and you have a fundamental conflict 
there. But when you are talking about individ- 
ual employers and individual wage earners they 
have a great many things in common. 

They have not an ultimate common interest 
but they have a very large common interest in 
the present order of things. They have the 
common interest to make the present order of 
things as socially efficient as it can be made, 
pending a time when it can be changed. I do 
not concede that there is any absolute conflict 
of ideas here. I believe it is practically sound 
that the present order of things can be made as 
socially efficient as possible without relinquish- 
ing any desire to make a fundamental change 
in the existing order of things. It appears to be 
a social hope of honest men, men socially minded, 
to make the present machinery do the best work 
it is capable of doing while they are getting 
ready to make new machinery to take its place. 
Both the employer and employed have this in 
common, — both are suffering from a common 
imperfect system; both are suffering from the 
same evil. When any group of men of either 
section recognise that fact and are willing in all 
sincerity to take hold and try to remove the 
common evil, there is at once a common interest 
between that group of employers and employed, 
enduring so long as they work together for the 



70 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

time when the present economic antagonism will 
be removed. This antagonism is a fact pressing 
hard upon all of us. We are all suffering from 
it in every walk of life — not simply the capital- 
ist and the labourer, but the intelligent work- 
ers. And the day of redemption for us, the day 
of release, will be postponed by any propaganda 
making for hatred between man and man. The 
full answer to a declaration of war against indi- 
viduals is the increase of class warfare. It 
must also be remembered that w^ar is never 
stopped when one or the other side wins an abso- 
lute victory. This is not a victory, for nothing 
was ever settled in that way yet. It will have to 
be waged all over again. 

The only possible way to find a day of release 
from the common evils that are oppressing all of 
us is to get the most of us together in the common 
cause, to get the great mass of workers and the 
more prominent members of society to join hands 
to remove the common imperfect system and the 
common immorality in our social organisation. 

DIRECT ACTION 

Labour's tactics in this Syndicalist warfare, 
in which it differs from Socialism, is " direct 
action.'^ Here it breaks with Socialism ; it says 
nothing of political action ; it will have nothing 
to do with legislation. This it declares to be a 



SYNDICALISM 71 

delusion; it leaves the worker distracted — he 
doesn't act. It wants direct action on his part 
in the economic field, instead of action through 
political means. Political action is diplomacy; 
direct action is war. 

The term " direct action'^ can be applied 
legitimately to labour action in the industrial 
and economic field as against political action. 
As a matter of fact it comes to mean the radical 
tactics employed by the Syndicalists in Europe 
and the Industrial Workers of the World in this 
country. Those tactics may be summarised 
thus : 

(1) General Strike. 

(2) Sabotage. 

The General Strike is advocated to bring 
about a condition in which society being par- 
alysed, the industrial workers will have to come 
to its rescue. In preparation for the general 
strike all sorts of small strikes can be encour- 
aged, and while the general strike does not in- 
volve violence, some syndicalist leaders have 
thought that it may be a good thing to advocate 
violence in the small strikes. What we have 
here is the re-appearance of an old ideal that has 
been seen time and time again in the labouring 
and industrial world. The writings of Syndi- 
calists in Europe indicate that the general strike 



7^ THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

is not so mucli a practical thing as a " myth/' 
Sovel, the French leader, declares that there are 
from time to time certain pert ideas and ideals, 
or " myths '- which are sources of social progress. 
When you come to actual development these 
myths have no full realisation in practical action. 
They do their work in firing the passions of men. 
The trouble is that this sort of idea is likely to 
remain but a myth when you come to try it out. 
In the first place no general strike on the part of 
the industrial workers would paralyse industry. 
There is something more to be reckoned with 
than the manufacturing process. There is the 
great farming process from which food must 
come; there is the great credit system on which 
the modern world depends. The general strike 
must include the whole to be successful. 

If it can be accomj)lished without violence, 
which is an extremely unlikely thing, you would 
simply have transferred the ownership of indus- 
trial property from one class to another. You 
would not have settled the fundamental root of 
the diflficulty, vrhich is the social institution of 
property. That is the root of the whole indus- 
trial question, and that cannot be settled by one 
group. It can only be settled by a com- 
mon agreement on the part of the people as a 
whole. 



SYNDICALISM 73 



SABOTAGE 



Sabotage means the carrying out of " direct 
action '^ by interference witH the industrial pro- 
cess. It comes from a French word meaning 
work clumsily done. The first appearance of it 
in a general policy was following a strike in 
Scotland, where some dock labourers struck for 
shorter hours and higher wages. The strike was 
defeated by the introduction of farm labourers 
as strike breakers. After the men went back to 
work in their old places the leaders got them 
together and said : " You can do your work as 
poorly as those fellows who took your places.'' 
They went back to work to shirk their jobs and 
in a little while they got their increased pay on 
condition of doing better work. 

The primary form of sabotage is this : instead 
of giving a good piece of work for a poor day's 
pay, its advocates said, ^^We will give a poor 
day's work in return for a poor day's pay." The 
French have resolved this into a philosophy of 
sabotage, with such refinements as are typical of 
the French mind. They have developed many 
curious forms of sabotage : carrying out literally 
the multitude of orders on a railroad and so con- 
fusing traffic ; changing the labels on freight ; the 
strike of the open mouth, — by telling customers 
the actual facts about the goods they are about 



74 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

to purchase^ and last of all, the Malthusian 
strike to limit the birthrate and lessen the supply 
of industrial workers. In this country the advo- 
cates of sabotage state that it means any inter- 
ference with industry with the purpose of limit- 
ing output, or injuring the employer for the 
benefit of the worker, provided no other means 
are available. Violence is not countenanced 
or taught by advocates of sabotage. They 
are more interested in getting ready the minds 
of the workers in preparation of the general 
strike than in the actual process of industry. 
They recognise it is a dangerous weapon to use, 
dangerous in more ways than one. Socialists 
have disavowed it. In this country they have 
adopted a resolution that any member teaching 
sabotage or any form of crime as a means for 
the emancipation of the working class, shall be 
expelled. This has been adopted not on grounds 
of the consequences to capital, but on grounds of 
the consequences to labour, because the history of 
labour shows that the use of that weapon — and 
it is an old weapon — being double-edged, hurts 
labour just as much as it does capital; that it 
brings distrust, breaks down morality, breaks 
down solidarity, and comes even to be used 
within labour circles for personal and factional 
ends. It is on these grounds that the Socialist 
groups have disavowed it. The most prominent 



SYNDICALISM 75 

American Syndicalist was recently recalled from 
membership in the Socialist National Committee 
for advocating sabotage. 

Some Syndicalist leaders attempt to establish 
the ethical validity of sabotage. They are not 
restrained by the ethics that cling around private 
property for its protection. You remember that 
there was some sabotage in Boston Harbor some 
time ago and the ethical question depends on 
whose ox is being gored. The thesis is that when 
the industrial worker does an act which may be 
destructive for the sake of the social good^ it is 
not necessarily harmful. That is your old 
familiar doctrine that the end justifies the 
means; it is the old familiar doctrine of doing 
evil that good may come of it, and history has 
proved that those who use a means which they 
question to accomplish an end, in the long run 
defeat their own end and absolutely destroy their 
own capacity for reaching that end. 

Syndicalism gives us this gain. It attempts 
to put before us the great ideal of solidarity and 
shows us the necessity for it. It says that a 
state in which political bureaucracy was set over 
industry would be intolerable and insufferable, 
and it does rightly call our attention to the 
necessity of some simpler form of social organ- 
isation and control in the industrial field. But 
in its tactics it defeats itself and it seeks what is 



76 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

impossible in social progress, a short cut to an 
ideal which all just men will recognise as one 
of the great and desirable ideals of the race. 

If men are going to do what Syndicalism says 
it is doing, or wants to do, — prepare workers in 
the industrial field to be able to take their part 
in the development of the race, prepare the new 
society (and even the Socialists admit that much 
education remains to be done before wide- 
spread collectivism is possible) then what they 
have to do is not to teach warfare, not to develop 
anarchistic methods which will disturb the labour 
process ; what they have to do is to develop social 
efficiency on the part of the group at the bottom 
of society, and that is a task which the whole 
community must face in answer to this challenge 
from the industrial group at the bottom. 



SYNDICALISM 77 



Q. Is the solidarity ideal of the I. W. W. a pro- 
duct of necessity or of free choice? 

A. It is a combination of both. The concen- 
tration of modern industry and the organisation 
of the skilled workers, have both been pressing 
upon the group at the bottom ; but it is more than 
that, it is the stirring up of an ideal in human 
history. This is one of the modern expressions 
of it. 

Q. What method might be used in the case of 
the industrial organisation to get results in re- 
gard to individual efficiency of the worker which 
is not now set them by trade unions? 

A. In my observation of many forms of work, 
the most effective procedure to secure the largest 
amount of efficiency on the part of the individual 
worker, is to enable him to get the results of his 
w^ork. 

Q. Does not philosophic anarchism seek to 
develop the individual, physically, morally, spir- 
itually and mentally? 

A. That is undoubtedly its purpose and its 
plan. The question remains whether its end can 
be accomplished without a very large degree of 
community action to the same end. 

Q. What is the difference between the Chicago 
branch of the I. W. W. and the Detroit faction? 

A. The Detroit faction believes in more con- 



78 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

servative methods and in political action while 
the Chicago faction believes in radical methods 
in the industrial field. Of coufse the Detroit 
faction is the much smaller group. 

Q. If open warfare or sabotage is not accept- 
able to Christian ethics what would you advocate 
for the unskilled worker who belongs to the I. 
W. W. if he did not get enough wages? What 
would you advise him to do? 

A. I do not see that he betters his position 
materially by sabotage. I do not see that he is 
able effectively to strike while on the job; his 
only weapon that is effective now is that of the 
actual strike. 

Q. Are not the Syndicalists and the industrial 
trade unionists all members of one group? 

A. There are many different groups. There 
are some trade unionists who will co-operate, 
there are others who will not, and the tendency 
in this country just now is toward dissension. 

Q. Is the doctrine of sabotage ethically justi- 
fiable? 

A. I think I answered that question in the last 
of my speech. No action is ethically justifiable 
which results in a larger social injury. And 
taking the whole social effects of sabotage upon 
the world as well as upon the employer it is in- 
jurious. And it is unethical because of this. 



SYNDICALISM 79 

Q. Dare we trust this outlawed class who con- 
stitute the I. W. W. very largely? 

A. The question of danger is that their passiv- 
ity may merge to popular passion. That is the 
underlying danger in the fact that you can't 
achieve results by passivity alone. You have 
two alternatives; that is to attempt to do it by 
force and the other is to go through a long course 
of patient education of the community. 

Q. Were not many strikes won by the use of 
sabotage in the United States? 

A. That depends upon what you mean by the 
term. They are not included in the term as 
Syndicalists use it, to mean not collective action 
but rather individual action for collective needs. 

Q. How far would the advocates of present 
sabotage under the present system be justified 
by the action of those who for principle threw 
the tea in Boston Harbor? 

A. If they follow the same principles they 
would lead to the same results. Whether they 
would be justified is an open question. 



IV. THE DEMAND FOE LEISURE 

One of the first demands of labour is the demand 
for release from excessive toil. This becomes 
also the demand for leisure, and upon the satis- 
faction of that demand depends the possibility of 
labour being able to attain its own ideals. The 
programme of the Socialist or of the Syndicalist, 
in fact any programme for the development of 
the welfare of the group of toil, depends upon a 
certain amount of training, and preparation 
which can only be secured upon the basis of 
leisure. 

Now labour has made some gains in the direc- 
tion of securing its primary demand : '' a fair 
day's work for a fair day's pay.'' In the early 
part of the last century, the average working 
day in English-speaking countries was fourteen 
hours. In the middle of the last century the 
average working day in this country was twelve 
hours. As late as 1860 people were working in 
the cotton mills of Massachusetts for a 13 
hour day and a 78 hour week. To-day the aver- 
age working day in English-speaking countries 
is about ten hours, and the greatest part of that 

80 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 81 

gain has come in the last twenty -five years. In 
Boston the first eight-hour league in this country 
was organised. In Massachusetts was estab- 
lished the first Bureau of Labor Statistics to give 
the public the facts, without which this fight for 
relief from excessive toil could not be success- 
fully waged. The United States Government 
began to reduce its working day before the 
middle of the last century, cutting down first to 
ten hours in its industrial establishments, and 
then to eight, and that which is good for the 
Government ought to be good for private indus- 
try. But I suppose it is one of the vices of 
democracy, that we will achieve certain social 
gains in government employment in order to get 
the support of labour and will refrain from 
enforcing those gains in private industry in 
order not to alienate the employing interests. 

We have in the matter of women's labour made 
still further gains. In the case of both women 
and minors we have reduced the working day 
from fourteen and sixteen hours (which it was 
in the beginning of the last century), to ten and 
eight. Most child labour law^s now in the pro- 
gressive States refuse to permit the employment 
of children between fourteen and eighteen years 
for more than eight hours, and two or three 
States have eight-hour laws regarding the labour 
of women. The United States Supreme Court 



89 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

has upheld the ten-hour law for women and is 
now considering the eight-hour law. 

We have also made some progress in eliminat- 
ing the seven-day week. There has been a united 
demand on the part of labour, on the part of 
intelligent politicians, and on the part of the 
united churches of this country to secure the 
relief of labour from the seven-day week. The 
demand is made on the simple basis of the 
necessity of the rest day, on the principle that 
the man is more sacred even than any day, and 
that to the man must be secured the right of 
rest. When labour becomes fully aware of the 
necessity for the weekly rest day and will join 
wdth its full force with the allied groups in mak- 
ing that demand, we shall secure it, in every 
State in this Union. It is an indication again 
of the backwardness of our social organisation 
that only at this late day we should be enforcing 
a demand for a weekly rest day. 

There are probably almost 20 per cent, of the 
workers of this country who are working w^here 
the twelve-hour day still obtains. That percent- 
age covers of course a great many skilled trades 
where the eight-hour day has been secured by 
organisation and it therefore leaves a great many 
trades and industries w^here the tw^elve-hour day 
is still running. The steel trade is the greatest 
offender in this respect. United States Steel 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 83 

insists that less than 30 per cent, of its men are 
working a twelve-hour day, but that is not a 
fair computation for the reason that it covers 
all the men in the employ, of the steel trust. 
When you limit the inquiry, as it should be 
limited, to the men working in those branches 
of the trade in which the twelve-hour shift is 
practiced, for example the blast-furnaces, you 
have between fifty and sixty per cent, that are 
w^orking the twelve-hour day. In spite of the 
fact that the steel manufacturers of Great 
Britain and Germany have gone over to the eight- 
hour day and have been more proficient in pro- 
duction as a result, the Iron and Steel Institute 
of this country refuses to abolish the twelve-hour 
shift. 

In this country the gains in reducing the hours 
of labour have been secured in the face of the 
opposition of the employers who have stead- 
fastly, for the most part, opposed both organised 
labour in its attempt for shorter hours and have 
fought short hour legislation through their 
lobbies. And it is the power of organised labour 
that has called attention to the necessity for 
short hour legislation. It was the bookbinders 
of England who first proposed the ten-hour law ; 
it was the ship caulkers of the United States, 
back in 1806, who produced the first ten-hour 
law here; it was organised labour in Australia 



84. THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

that formed the first Eight Hour League ; and it 
was only when the Women's Trade Union League 
became an active force in making legislation that 
we were able to procure legislation for women 
and children. The great initiating force in 
shortening the working day has been the organ- 
ised labour of this country. 

THE RESULTS OF FATIGUE 

The essence of the first demand in this field of 
the shorter work-day is that labour should be pro- 
tected from the results of fatigue. When you 
are trying to set the length of the working day 
by law, for the defence not simply of the working 
group industrially but for the defence of society, 
the principle that enters in is the principle that 
labour must not be worked beyond the point of 
fatigue. That is the position on which the 
United States Supreme Court upholds short day 
legislation for women. On the basis of evidence 
shoTving the physical effects of fatigue, the court 
held that the public good demands that women 
should not be worked beyond the point of fatigue, 
that being presumably the limit of the defensive 
power of the State. 

When you take the human animal out of his 
natural outdoor environment and put him to 
work within four walls, you are creating a se- 
rious disturbance in his constitution. You are 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 85 

not simply taking him out of his fresh air envi- 
ronment ; you are putting him into a factory and 
exposing him to a strain of noise and speed. 
You are requiring the human body, both its 
muscular and nervous system, to speed up be- 
yond its natural rhythm, beyond the natural 
tempo of its movements, to keep up with the 
rhythm of the machine, and the result of that is 
a serious derangement, both physical and nerv- 
ous. 

The first results are seen in the records of 
accidents, for from 70 to 90 per cent, of our in- 
dustrial accidents occur after the hour of three 
o'clock in the afternoon, and the larger propor- 
tion of these occur in the last hour of the working 
day. It is the tenth hour of the working day 
that is the deadly hour in the factory, because 
then nature's safety defences have been broken 
through, because the worker has passed the point 
of fatigue. 

Perhaps the most conclusive report on health 
ever shown to the world is the report of our Com- 
mittee of One Hundred on National Vitality, 
now a United States document, and it makes this 
statement : " The present working day, from a 
physical standpoint, is altogether too long, and 
keeps the majority of women or men in a con- 
tinual state of over-fatigue.'' Now the patholo- 
gists tell us to-day that there is a definite poison 



86 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

set up in the human system by over -work. They 
name it " the toxin of fatigue." When the mus- 
cular or nervous energy has been worked to the 
point of fatigue the body no longer carries off the 
poisonous secretions ; they remain in the system, 
and besides having their own toxic effect they 
render the body more liable to the attacks of dis- 
ease, they weaken its resistance power to the 
germs that lie in wait for all of us. And that is 
the great reason for the high mortality rate of 
the wage earning group, from contagious disease, 
and from that group of diseases known as 
^^ misery'^ diseases. It is because their resist- 
ance power has been lowered. 

One of the most striking studies to show the 
injustice of our industrial systems is to take the 
mortality maps of our various cities and then 
to find out the district in which that mortality 
is massed. When you know the cities you will 
find in every case that those mortality maps 
show the death rate to be the most in the dis- 
tricts where the lowest paid groups of industrial 
workers live. That is, the death rate is highest 
in groups that are paid the least and worked the 
hardest, where life is lived at the lowest level and 
where it has the smallest chance of resisting the 
attacks upon it. And the effects are shown not 
only in the mortality rate but also in the effect 
upon birth, not simply upon the birth rate, al- 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 87 

though that is lowered in the outstanding indus- 
trial centres, but it is shown in the lowering of 
vitality at birth. When you bring into the world 
children whose parents have been weakened to 
the point of exhaustion, physically and nerv- 
ously, through years of fatigue accompanied by 
the lack of adequate nourishment or proper 
housing and fresh air, those children come into 
the world without an adequate physical fighting 
chance. We talk sometimes, in our careless, 
flippant way, about folks who are " born tired.'^ 
There is a scientific truth in that very phrase. 
There are children born of exhausted, under- 
nourished parents, who are literally at birth too 
tired ever to have a fair fighting chance. They 
can't be efllcient either industrially, intellec- 
tually, or morally. They have not the energy; 
they have not the vitality ; and, furthermore, we 
take no pains to see that they get a chance to 
make up that defect. Those children are placed 
in the worst kind of environment, in the lowest 
sections of our cities. And then we talk about 
the wastrels and derelicts in the gutters of our 
cities and wonder at the cause ! From the stand- 
point even merely of profitable business on the 
present basis, what greater stupidity could there 
be than to weaken people to the point of exhaus- 
tion and then produce a still weaker generation 
the next time? What agriculturist would pur- 



88 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

sue such a stupid policy in trying to procure Ms 
draft animals? He knows better. We know 
better, too, only we have not yet got the con- 
science to apply our knowledge in the way we 
ought 

It was because of this fact of the lessening of 
vitality, by fatigue that the United States 
Supreme Court made its decision concerning the 
ten-hour law for women. You will remember 
what part Boston had in that by presenting the 
brains and the heart which made that thing pos- 
sible, as a gift, to the working classes of this 
country; and it was because the brains of Mr. 
Brandeis and that woman who worked with him 
in putting before the Supreme Court such a mass 
of medical evidence gathered from the whole 
world to show conclusively the effects of fatigue 
in weakening the next generation, that the 
Supreme Court wrote a new principle into the 
law: that the health of the nation is more im- 
portant than the goods that can be produced by 
overworked labour. In the near future, when 
we can get the same mass of facts presented to 
the same courts concerning the labour of men, 
the nation will, by that time, have made up its 
mind that it can no more afford to have weak, 
unhealthy fathers than it can have weak un- 
healthy mothers. 

The results of fatigue appear not merely in the 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 89 

physical world ; they appear also in the economic 
realm. Labour carried to the point of fatigue 
means economic loss. That Report on National 
Vitality astonished the nation by showing that 
we were wasting an enormous amount of money, 
computed simply from the potential earnings of 
those dying from preventable diseases in this 
country. Then it showed that the economic 
waste from undue fatigue was much greater 
than that from the great preventable diseases; 
that the number of people who suffer from par- 
tial disability due to fatigue constitutes the great 
majority of the population. So we have here a 
great social evil from which the whole popula- 
tion is suffering but from which the industrial 
section is suffering more than any other group 
in the population. 

Now besides the directly traceable economic 
loss which comes from the inefllciency in produc- 
tion of those who are worked to the point of 
fatigue, there is also the indirect economic loss 
that the long working day brings. It involves a 
low wage, and that means a low standard of liv- 
ing, and that means a small measure of consump- 
tion and that means that the economic capacity 
of the country is constantly reduced. The old 
saw is perfectly correct that said : 

" Whether you work by the piece or the day, 
Decreasing the hour increases the pay." 



&0 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Indirectly, of course, this is true, not only for 
the wage-earning population affected but for the 
whole of society. Because when you decrease 
the working day, you raise the standard of living 
and increase the demands of the wage earning 
group, — you therefore make the demand for 
more production, more men are employed, and 
again you raise the standard of living. It is 
economically profitable to employers to reduce 
the working day and increase the standard of 
living for the working group. The short hour 
day has proved this even under the present sys- 
tem; it has been demonstrated again and again. 

In 1881 a report of the Massachusetts Bureau 
of Statistics declared that in the Atlantic States 
the reduction of the working day from eleven 
to ten hours had produced an increase and not 
a decrease, economically. In many places the 
eight-hour day has also proved economically 
more profitable. One of the best outstanding 
cases is that of the United States Government, 
based upon two battleships built in 1894 
from the same plans. One was built in the Gov- 
ernment shipyards at eight hours a day ; one was 
built by private contract at ten hours a day ; and 
when they got through the Government-built 
ship, on the eight hour day proposition, showed 
conclusively that the average work per man per 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 91 

hour was over 25 per cent, more than on the ten 
hour day privately built ship. 

Over in England in the iron and steel trade is 
another remarkable illustration. There organ- 
ised labour and capital worked together to dem- 
onstrate the increased efficiency due to shorter 
hours. Organised labour agreed that it would 
have to reduce gradually by small groups of men, 
so as to make the change without undue derange- 
ment of the industry and that those who were 
getting the higher wage would have to pay a 
bonus to those who would have to get a lower 
wage until it could be demonstrated that the 
experiment was profitable. The result was that 
in a very short time the whole change was ef- 
fected and that bonus didn't have to be paid be- 
cause it was proved that the change resulted in 
increase of production. 

Now of course there is a limit to the increase 
of production because by shortening the work- 
day, although you can speed up the men in many 
industries, in some machine industries you can't 
speed up the machines. In some industries it is 
economically profitable to run on the eight hour 
rather than on the nine or the ten or the twelve 
hour basis. Where it is not, where the effect of 
reducing hours is to reduce the profits, it raises 
the fundamental question of the reward of the 



92 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

capitalists and its relations to the community 
good. When that question is raised the only 
answer of the community must be that the reduc- 
tion of the working day cannot he determined by 
the question of profits^ but simply and solely by 
the question of social welfare. The question is 
to whom does this matter of profits fundamen- 
tally refer? Are we to consider here the 
economic values simply in terms of the good of 
one group that happens in the course of social 
development now to have possession of industry, 
or are we to consider economic values in terms 
of the good of the whole community? If we 
decide the latter, the next question is, if we are to 
consider simply w^hether the short day is profit- 
able to the whole community economically speak- 
ing, or whether its profit is to be considered in 
terms of the net results to human life. And the 
new economy, corresponding to the quickened 
sense of human justice — the new economy that 
is just getting itself written in the text-books — 
insists that the only final economic standard is 
that of human values and not the production of 
goods. 

I picked up my morning paper this morning 
and I found an editorial on the question of in- 
dustrial conservation — the results of a study of 
a professor in a great university concerning the 
effects of scientific management — and I find it 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 93 

classified under three heads: complete success, 
partial success and failure. The standard of 
success is whether there has been an increased 
profit and an increased wage — • " business three 
times what it was before '' — " |18,000 saved in 
six years/' with no attempt to determine the off- 
set in the w^ay of deteriorated health. The 
modern political economy is not satisfied with 
such a test as that. We want to know not 
simply whether there is more profits and more 
wages, but what are the long-time results to 
human life, w^hat are the results in the end to the 
worker and to society; and not merely whether 
or not he has shown any sickness in the first year 
of this efficiency scheme but what is the result 
over a period of years to his nervous system and 
his moral and mental nature. That is what we 
want to know before we are going to pass judg- 
ment on the value of this thing. The question is 
not answered by showing increased efficiency in 
production, or no immediate depreciation in 
health; it is only answered when you trace the 
results of the fatigue engendered by this effi- 
ciency process, back over a period of years, in its 
individual and moral results. And so, finally, 
we are going to settle this question of fatigue and 
speeding up, and efficiency, by its moral and 
social results. What are they? 

Go through the twelve hour communities and 



94 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

find out! Let the scientists tell you from their 
Report on Vitality. They declare that fatigue 
starts a vicious circle, involving drunkenness and 
other excesses. Let another scientist speak: 
" The first school of man's family life is a closed 
book against the man who only comes home dead 
tired at night.'^ Go through the twelve hour 
communities in this country and you will find 
confirmation of this statement. You will find 
there increased consumption of alcohol, with a 
lower degradation of human life; you will find 
there also the most brutal forms of vice existing 
as a natural result of reducing human nature to 
the brute state. The mental and moral and 
social results, in the broadest sense, of fatigue, 
are simply disastrous to society. This is in- 
creasingly clear in the case of the labour of girls 
and women ; there it is particularly clear. When 
you face the great fact that the armies of vice are 
recruited preponderantly (almost universally) 
from the wage earning group, you are facing one 
of the moral effects of fatigue. The relation of 
improper conditions of labour for girls and 
women to vice is not simply a relation between 
low wages with monotonous life and easy money 
with excitement — no such bald choice is thrown 
up as that (except in a very few cases) to the 
working women of this country. What happens 
is this ; the slow breaking down of nature's moral 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 95 

safety devices by the long process of fatigue. 
Then J as the great majority of testimony from 
the places of vice proves, then life itself becomes 
the betrayer because nature has been reduced to 
the point of exhaustion almost, through a period 
of over-work and monotonous occupation. 

When moral disaster does not occur whether 
in manhood or womanhood, as the effect of 
fatigue, you still have other serious moral re- 
sults. You have life reduced almost to the brute 
level, you have life that is simply one round of 
toil, with then perhaps some corresponding ex- 
citement to atone for the monotony of its dead 
level, but with no response to the stimulus for the 
development of the higher nature. In the twelve 
hour communities the low level of life is the 
worst fact that the social observer has to face — 
the fact that life has no power of reaching up 
because its energies are so exhausted, that it has 
no capacity to climb because it has been kept 
down by the dead pressure of fatigue. 

THE RESULTS OF LEISURE 

If the first duty is to rescue the group at the 
bottom from the pressure of fatigue, the next 
duty is to secure for the industrial group the 
results of leisure. If the industrial group must 
be protected from the results of fatigue it must 
have access to the results of leisure; and the 



96 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

results of leisure are culture. All your super- 
structure of civilisation depends upon a certain 
degree of leisure and if men are to be educated 
they must be released from exhausting toil, they 
must be released from continued application to 
the work of producing the necessities of life if 
they are to have any chance to climb up to the 
heights of culture. You may define culture in 
any sense you please. You may have the Greek 
ideal of culture of the body. What chance has a 
man worked to the point of fatigue to follow that 
ideal whether he sits over a desk or works with 
a pick in the street; in either occupation what 
chance has he? You may tell him that his body 
needs a bath every morning to allow it to 
breathe; you may tell him that his muscles need 
exercise; is he going to get it? Has he the time 
and the strength? And you may build your 
gymnasiums and your swimming pools, and they 
are of no benefit, as long as he is worked to the 
point of exhaustion. You have physical mal- 
adjustment instead of physical development. 

You tell men that there are opportunities for 
mental culture. No man who is speeded up for 
ten hours a day has got time or energy enough 
left over from the bread and butter business of 
life to make that struggle, to go through that 
process of discipline. Here stands a Hebrew 
beside a machine in the sweat of New York, and 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 97 

he says : " If I am hungry in New York some- 
one will give me a crust, and if I am thirsty some- 
one will give me a drink, but now my soul is 
thirsty for knowledge and my mind is starving 
for learning, and w^ho will give it to me? '' He 
says : " Men tell me to go to night school. 
Have they ever tried it after w^orking ten hours 
a day at a machine?'^ You can extend your 
night school system as much as you please, boast 
as you may about our free educational system, if 
people have not time to take advantage of it, it 
is all a bitter mockery to them. As the Colorado 
steel worker said : " Andy can build a library 
but it's no good to build it here. We twelve 
hour men have no time or strength to read his 
books.'^ 

Here comes Professor Steiner, w^ho has come up 
from it all and he says : " The end of the day, 
when the work w as over, proved to be the hardest 
period of my experience. I went to sleep at once 
when the strain was over. I was just like the 
cattle." We treat them like cattle and then call 
them cattle. He was then working in the steel 
mill in Pittsburgh ten hours a day. He says: 
" The worst feature is the day's complete ex- 
haustion which follows long hours with its numb- 
ness and the dullness that grips into a man's 
soul. At the end of a ten hour day in the steel 
mill, if I had been offered anything except a good 



98 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

supper and bed, I would not have accepted it, 
although I was hungry for the other things.'^ 

Now it is harder to climb out than it was 
twenty years ago when Professor Steiner 
climbed. 

This same thing is true about the development 
of the spiritual life. If a man is going to have 
a chance to develop his spirit, if he is to hold high 
converse with the great and lofty ones of the past, 
to invite his soul into fellowship with the Eter- 
nal, to throw his passionate spirit into the great 
struggle for brotherhood and justice, he must 
have time and strength to do these things. 

The cultured class is the leisure class ; and if 
we are going to have culture throughout the 
whole of our society, we must have leisure 
throughout the whole of society. And remember 
this also : a leisure class is never a truly cultured 
class, for the cultured class is a working class 
too. God didn't make some folks all muscle and 
others all brain. He didn't make some all hands 
and others all mind. He put them together, 
and the divorce of so-called culture and produc- 
tive work has been one of the fatal fallacies of 
civilisation. We have to put culture into the 
very heart of the industrial process and let a man 
in the making of things find the development of 
his mind; let him there, as he does the work of 
the world, find all the beauty and all the art, 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 99 

and all the music and all the joy ; let him there 
put his soul into fellowship with the eternal, 
give his spirit into bonds of brotherhood with his 
fellowmen. That will be true culture — that 
the human race may develop its soul while work- 
ing out things. 

THE RIGHT TO LIVE 

Thus we see that the demand for leisure is the 
demand for life itself. It is the demand for the 
results of leisure, the attainment of all true cul- 
ture. Somebody stops to ask : " How will he use 
it?'^ That question is not before the house. 
There is a previous question there that must be 
answ^ered first. When you have given men their 
rights you can begin to talk about how they 
should use them and not before. And I would 
like to ask what class has the right to raise that 
question to the labour group? Is it the idle 
rich? Watch their clubs and their drawing 
rooms and their New Year's feasts in the restau- 
rants. Is it the business men? I read the other 
day in a local paper that an official of this State 
had to send an officer of the law to follow him to 
a banquet of the business men to which he had 
been invited, because it was so indecent. Is it 
the intellectual group? I go to the high -brow 
club only to get poisoned with the same foul air 
that I find in the labour hall. Is it the college 



100 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

group? Watch their athletics conducted on the 
same commercialised, gladiatoral plan that made 
a Roman holiday. It does not lie in the mouth 
of any group in this country to raise that ques- 
tion about the labour group. As a matter of 
fact, every time the labour group has secured 
leisure it has used it for its social development. 
Of course there will be individuals who will 
abuse liberty, but the net result of liberty has 
been this : wherever the eight hour day exists it 
has been used for the intellectual and moral de- 
velopment of the worker. There is no justifica- 
tion for the charge that indirectly the reduction 
of hours and the raising of the living standard is 
strengthening the organised forces of iniquity. 
To-day when you want support for a moral 
proposition, when the churches want support in 
a temperance fight, the labour leaders supply it. 
I have just learned to-day that the strongest sup- 
port for a certain proposition in the fight against 
alcohol is from the leaders of the labour group. 
They are coming to understand how to use their 
time, how to use it for the development of their 
own capacities in order that they may climb to 
their proper place. 

The demand for leisure is the demand for life 
itself. We have been expanding life. It is a 
bigger world we live in — new horizons in gov- 
ernment, in industry, new horizons in thought, 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 101 

everywhere. And in that expanding world you 
have put the industrial worker into a smaller 
world and a smaller environment. For your 
automatic machine worker is not as big a man 
as the old craftsman that preceded him. And 
when that automatic man is worked to the point 
of exhaustion he is still smaller; yet in this 
bigger world you need larger men. So it is not 
his loss alone ; it is a menace to society to suffer 
that man to become smaller. He becomes a prey 
to the pressure of special interests on both sides 
of this social question ; he becomes the easy tool 
of political demagogues ; he becomes the dupe of 
priestcraft^ of quackery in religion. And the 
world needs that man because he is the man who 
makes the group that is going to control the 
world to-morrow. The world needs that man to 
have the biggest development and environment 
that can be accorded to him. The democracy of 
the Carpenter of Nazareth demands that. You 
read the Scripture and you can't see v/hy the 
banker should go home at three or four o'clock 
and the labourer should stay in the mills until 
six o'clock. There is no justice to it. The 
men who do the harder, longer, and more dan- 
gerous work are the ones who need more recrea- 
tion and more chance for the release from the 
effects of that toil. The teachings of the Car- 
penter demand that we drive out of the world 



10^ THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

forever and ever the idea that one class of people 
are to do all the diJBflcult, dangerous and monot- 
onous work. 

We cannot have a Brahmin class of culture in 
our land with special privilege in leisure and a 
monopoly of intellectual service. 

The rule of the world to-morrow is to go to 
brains, and brains must be developed if we are 
to have a universal and permanent democracy in 
the world. The teachings of Jesus demand 
this — that there shall be no group of special 
privilege in society, that the innermost worth of 
the downmost man shall be developed to the ut- 
termost point. It demands a brotherhood of la- 
bour and toil where all the people share in the 
dangers and difficulties of the hard work of the 
world, and a brotherhood of leisure where all the 
people share equally in all the opportunities of 
culture and development. 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 103 



Q. Is not the rate of progress of the present 
time more important than its direction? 

A. I think that the direction is established, 
and I agree with the question that the main task 
now is to accelerate the rate of progress in that 
direction. 

Q. Is there any group of disciples who are fol- 
lowing the rules laid down by the Carpenter of 
Nazareth? 

A. I know many groups. I meet them in all 
walks of life ; some in the employing group, some 
in the trade union group, some in the socialist 
group, some in the syndicalist group, some in the 
privileged class, who are genuinely trying, as best 
they can, to follow and carry out that teaching. 

Q. Does not the capitalist foresee the ultimate 
break-down of labour and so refuses to hire men 
after forty years of age, getting all the labour he 
can out of men between sixteen and thirty? 

A. That is getting to be the general rule in 
large industry, and scientific management in- 
creases the proportion. 

Q. Should not the employed class try to work 
out their own salvation and organize themselves 
for mutual protection instead of worrying about 
a job? 

A. That would be one of the best things they 
could do. 



104 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. Whicli is preferable, the group of thinkers 
who strive for more liberty leaving economic 
questions to take care of themselves, or the group 
who strive for economic gains leaving leisure to 
take care of itself? 

A. Hitch them up and drive them double. 

Q. Does not the cultured class have to work? 
Do you advise your theological students when 
they get a parish to get out and work? 

A. I think I made it clear that no class can be 
truly cultured that separates itself from the 
actual work of the world. We shall never get 
the higher type of culture until we join mental 
work with actual production. We are trying to 
do it with our theological students as nearly as 
possible. 

Q. How about the short time as applied to the 
farmer? Doesn't it hurt the smaller one un- 
duly? 

A. No, if we get rid of the concentrated con- 
trol of the transportation of farm products the 
small farmer has a good chance. 

Q. What is the title of the report of the Com- 
mittee of One Hundred? 

A. Report on National Vitality. 

Q. If the eight hour life is economically 
proved sound why isn't it adopted by all manu- 
facturers? 



THE DEMAND FOR LEISURE 105 

A. I heard a man say the other day that you 
can't legislate for blame fools. 

Q. If a man goes to work at four o'clock, works 
until twelve o'clock, then has half an hour for 
lunch, goes back to work at twelve-thirty, and 
works until eight-thirty, is that an eight hour 
law? And if it occurs on Saturday does that 
make for leisure? And if the last hour of that 
period goes over into Sunday does it assist 
Christianity? 

A. That is nothing but pure pagan slavery and 
if you will tell us where it is carried on in this 
city we will try to have it stopped. 

Q. It is carried on in the United States Gov- 
ernment. 

A. There has been a demand afoot recently 
regarding the postal carriers ; an attempt to over- 
work them and evade the law. That attempt has 
been checked. That is not the kind of eight hour 
law I would stand for. 

Q. Is not the farmer that works from ten to 
twelve hours a day out in the open air abun- 
dantly able to perform that work, because he is 
doing it for himself? 

A. That depends upon the kind of man he is. 
If he wants to live in the largest sense of the 
word he had better get through his day's work 
in less time than that. 



106 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. I would like to have the speaker's definition 
of leisure. 

A. I was using the term to-day of course in the 
sense of sufficient release from the necessary 
economic work of life in order to develop the 
higher side of human nature. 

Q. I meant " culture.'^ 

A. I will leave that to the newspapers. 

Q. Doesn't the speeding up process of machin- 
ery bring about a condition where the eight hours 
under such circumstances is worse than the ten 
hours under ordinary circumstances? 

A. The eight hour law is no good until you put 
into the legislation something about speed as well 
as time. 



V. THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 

THE SOCIAL SURPLUS^ ITS DISTRIBUTION 

The first demand of labour is for a fair day's 
work and for a fair day's pay. That demand 
enlarges, as the labour movement expands, into 
a demand for leisure following the demand for a 
release from the long day, and also into a demand 
for income following the demand for release from 
starvation wages. These two demands belong 
together and, of course, the demand of labour for 
income is only one expression of the universal 
demand. We sometimes forget that; because 
labor's demand for income comes to us a little 
more directly and sometimes a little more 
harshly than the demand of other groups. We 
all must remember that the demand of the agri- 
cultural group, of the capitalist group and of the 
professional group is not different from the de- 
mand of the industrial, wage earning group. 
The wizard of finance, he milks us tenderly. 
But labour's voice is harsh and his hand is rough. 
Your great capitalist puts his finger skilfully 
into your pocket and takes out what he wants by 
fractions, in the cost of food or the price of trans- 
portation, and if you don't exactly bless him for 

107 



108 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

it, at least you rather admire him for it. But 
when the mechanical wage earner comes along, it 
seems as though he were saying, " Hands-up/' 
because what he wants has come out in a bigger 
sum, and directly. We shall not approach this 
question fairly until we realise, as Kennedy tried 
to teach the folks of England in " The Servant 
in the House,'' that the man who cleans the 
drains has just as much right to the best of life 
as the man who makes sermons or poems. I 
suppose, ill this land of democracy, we should 
now all concede that the plumber has a right to 
live like a gentleman — only, of course, we don't 
want him to act like a pirate, when he can use his 
power. 

This demand for income is like the demand for 
leisure. It is an expression of the fundamental 
right to live and not merely to exist. For life in 
its highest form, the life of culture and develop- 
ment, rests equally upon the possession of suf- 
ficient leisure to develop it and suflftcient income 
to maintain it. 

RELATION OF INCOME TO LIFE 

Income bears this direct relation to life — the 
lack of it means that life is weakened, diminished 
and distorted and finally becomes degenerate. 
The difference between a low and high order of 
civilisation may not be, as some witty cynic has 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 109 

said, " the difference between a piece of bread and 
a piece of beefsteak/' but there is a fundamental 
difference, nevertheless, between the results of 
adequate nourishment and the results of under- 
nourishment. As the w^orld is learning to-day, 
that if you want armies to fight it is as important 
to feed them properly as to give them ammuni- 
tion, so w^e must learn that if we want the wage 
earners to fight for us, to do the work of the 
world properly, they will have to be fed poperly. 

Under-nourishment or lack of proper nourish- 
ment and of physical fitness leads you^ in a 
vicious circle. It makes for inefficiency, which 
leads to disease. That results in a still lower 
income, and so around and around you go in that 
vicious circle until finally you have a group that 
is so far below the normal standard both physi- 
cally, mentally and morally, that it is, in fact, 
a degenerate group. You can find that group in 
a greater or less degree in every one of your in- 
dustrial cities as the result of the continuance 
of that vicious circle of under-nourishment, dis- 
ease and inefficiency. 

On the other hand, the presence of sufficient 
income ai^d nourishment is absolutely necessary, 
of course, to the higher life. Would folks get 
educated? Books cost money. Would folks 
develop the spiritual side of life, the things upon 
which man's spiritual nature feeds? It requires 



110 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

income to provide them. The folks who haven't 
got the income have to face a more serious hunger 
than the hunger for bread; it is the hunger for 
beauty, it is the hunger for knowledge, it is the 
hunger for spiritual satisfaction and growth. 
And that is the real force that is to-day driving 
the industrial wage-earning group to demand 
more income. 

They see the higher life and w^ant to have an 
American standard of living really brought to 
them. We think with some justice that we have 
a somewhat higher average of efficiency here than 
elsewhere, but that efficiency depends upon that 
standard of living and that standard of living 
depends upon a certain expenditure. It means 
higher tastes, it means an increased demand for 
the wherewithal to satisfy those tastes and that 
standard. And folks ask : " Where is this thing 
going to stop? '' as if they conceive of the wage 
earner standing continually, like Oliver Twist, 
holding his bowl out and always asking for more. 
Now in the name of all that is just where should 
it stop short of the satisfaction of this demand? 

I remember a conference that we had in 
Chicago regarding welfare work in factories and 
I remember one labourer getting up and saying : 
" Now, we are very glad to know that some of 
you people have proposed to put bathing privi- 
leges in the factories and give us a chance to clean 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 111 

up before we go home; we all want to look decent, 
but there is something else we want. We want 
bathtubs in our homes and we are going to have 
them, too.'^ I remember another man saying: 
"Where is this thing going to stop? Why, the 
next thing they will want is pianos in their 
homes/' And he called himself an American 
and a Christian ! Now to him, whose chief goal 
in life had been the making of money, not the 
serving of his f ellowmen — they go together 
sometimes, but not often or always — to him, the 
bathtub and the piano might be luxuries, but to 
the modern American Christian this and a great 
many other things are simply necessities, neces- 
sities of the higher life. And as long as you are 
teaching higher standards of living in the public 
schools and as long as you are showing the re- 
sults of this higher standard of living, you may 
depend upon it that just so long the demand of 
the industrial wage-earning class is being in- 
creased by all of the natural, normal processes of 
our American civilisation. And that demand 
will not stop. You can't compare the condition 
of folks here to what they had in the old country. 
You can't compare the condition of folks here 
with what men had in similar places forty and 
fifty years ago. The only sound basis of com- 
parison is with the average living standard which 
they see around them on the one hand, and on the 



112 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

other hand with the actual amount of their pro- 
duction^ as they are coming increasingly to see 
it to-day. These are the comparisons that have 
to be made, and in so far as Christian ethics is 
concerned, the whole impact of Christianity is to 
increase that demand and not to lessen it. 

A man stood up in a meeting that I attended 
in another city concerning welfare work and he 
said — he was a machinist in a factory : ^^ I 
want something more than welfare work in the 
factory.'' He said : " I have got two boys in 
my home and I don't want them to go through 
the mill." His voice broke. " I want to put 
them through the college up here on the hill. I 
w^ant a chance to do my welfare work in my own 
family in my own way." 

I got a letter last week from a man in a town 
where I had been speaking. He was a foreman. 
He said that he had never lost his sympathy with 
the folks who were not earning as much wages 
as he was. And, said he : ^^ I have never been 
able to realise my ideal, which I believe is the 
right of every wage earner, and that is to put 
my children through college." Now, you say: 
" If that ideal is to be satisfied, who is going to 
do the rough and hard work of the world? " If 
you are attempting to satisfy the righteous ideals 
of mankind, you will find a way to settle that — 
and some more practical questions also. 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 113 

There is no group in a community that is built 
around the democratic principle that can assume 
the right to higher education for its children and 
deny that right to any other group in the com- 
munity. In so far as Christian ethics are con- 
cerned, we stand for the expanded life for all, 
not for the limited, constricted, ascetic life. It 
is the life more abundant that the Carpenter 
talks about; not simply life everlasting in the 
world to come, but the hundred-fold more abun- 
dant life in this present world. Just as we have 
proclaimed the right of every human soul to that 
eternal life, so must we proclaim the right of 
every human soul to the more abundant life in 
this present world and so must we support all of 
the forces v/hich will help to realise that great 
ideal. 

But some practical man says : '' How can it 
be done? There seem to be such limits to human 
life and economic results that the Almighty 
Himself has put an eternal sanction on the 
division of folks into classes with their limita- 
tions.^^ Modern economic science is offering 
cold comfort to folks who take refuge in that kind 
of a theory, because it is but a theory. We have 
to-day a great social surplus that has been 
built up by the improvement of scientific knowl- 
edge, methods of industrial organisation and 
agricultural production. For the first time in 



114 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

liuman history, the human race is now living on 
a surplus instead of on a deficit basis. In the 
long generations of the past, races were strug- 
gling to get food sufficient to afford a proper 
basis for the existence of human life, but that 
condition no longer exists. Here is a great 
social surplus built up, being produced in a 
greater amount than will satisfy the hunger of 
the whole human race. Here are being piled up 
not only the necessities but also the luxuries of 
life. We see the evidence of that social surplus 
all around us. Here in the past few weeks man 
after man has gone on the stand before the Com- 
mission on Industrial Relations and told how 
they have been giving their scores and their 
hundreds of millions away. They have been dis- 
tributing this social surplus which has been 
built up by the combined efforts and favours of 
many people together, and by a combination of 
circumstances and the pressure of the social 
environment. Now labour stands looking at 
that immense social surplus. And labour stands 
also looking at the place where it is going ; sees 
it going for health in China (as labour's voice 
has recently said), for pensions to university 
professors, and for the feeding of birds; while 
at the same time the labour that has helped to 
make that surplus in these very industries is not 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 115 

able to properly nourish and adequately educate 
its own children. 

Therefore we face a question that is absolutely 
different from the question of the reward of the 
individual worker. We face the question of the 
distribution by groups of this great social sur- 
plus ; we face the fact that at present it is being 
distributed on no basis of justice whatever and 
that the results of this unjust distribution are 
socially detrimental both at the top and at the 
bottom of society. The figures have been so often 
repeated that they have become trite: the fact 
that 10 per cent, of our people in this country 
own 90 per cent, of the wealth and that the other 
90 per cent, have incomes which would scarcely 
make spending money for the 10 per cent.; the 
fact that the amount produced — the market 
value of the amount produced by the average in- 
dustrial wage earner, according to the United 
States Census figures, is just about three times 
the amount of the average industrial wage 
earner's income in this country. When the wage- 
earning group gets educated to that fact, they 
are going to ask how this thing has been juggled 
and even under the present system, with capital 
requiring its rights and management requiring 
its rights, labour is going to stop the magicians 
who have been shifting this three-fold shell and 



116 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

is going to find out under which shell its partic- 
ular pea has been concealed. 

You have another fundamental fact concern- 
ing the distribution of the fruits of industry and 
that is the relation of the wages of the industrial 
group to the cost of living. The fact is, that the 
cost of high living, or the high cost of living, 
whichever way you wish to put it, is pressing 
harder upon the industrial wage-earning group, 
perhaps, than upon the professional group and 
the lower section of the middle class group. We 
have no adequate figures in this country to make 
a perfectly exact statement, but such figures as 
we have tend to indicate that at least 75 per cent, 
of the male workers north of the Mason and 
Dixon line are to-day getting less than a living 
wage, when you compute the living wage for 
the average family of five (that is, a man and 
wife and three children), on the basis of mere 
necessities. For example, 75 per cent, of the 
workers north of the Mason and Dixon line are 
getting less than |600 a year. All our standard 
of living figures indicate that the actual cost of 
subsistence — mere physical necessities — for 
the average family is from |400 to |600 a year 
according to the section of the country, and that 
the cost of an adequate living, that is, providing 
something for recreation, something for sickness, 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 117 

something for old age, is somewhere between 
|750 and |1,000 according to the section of 
the country and the city concerned. Now just 
broad facts like that indicate the fundamental 
inequity of our present distribution of the joint 
product of our common work process, and indi- 
cate something more, — that we have not yet 
attempted to divide that product, generally 
speaking, on a basis of justice. 

The facts are undeniable: that prices rise 
before wages and always fall after wages have 
fallen, and ever the income of the wage-earning 
group is pressed down toward the line of sub- 
sistence. If it is pressed up at all, it is pressed 
up usually only by the efforts of the workers 
themselves through their own organisations. 
And the question that is raised here concerning 
the right of the wage earners to share in the fruits 
of our civilisation, to share more largely in the 
material basis for the higher life, is a question 
that must be answered simply and solely by the 
standard of justice. No amount of philan- 
thropy, no amount of benevolent paternalism, no 
amount of welfare work, will either satisfy or 
evade that question. It is a question that cannot 
be downed in the world as long as we have a con- 
science created by the ethics taught by Jesus. 

When we come to answer that question, there 



118 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

are one or two methods that are being tried to 
remove or lessen the inequity. Organisation has 
pushed wages up through collective bargaining 
and has secured a higher standard of living for 
certain of its own members. In addition to that 
a defence has been put up for some of the help- 
less creatures at the bottom of the labour group 
by the legislative provision of a minimum wage. 
That has not been extended very far in this coun- 
try yet. I think only seven States have it and in 
two of those the attempt is only to make public 
the effect of the inadequacy of the w^age and to 
depend upon the pressure of public opinion to 
bring about a beneficial result. The principle 
enacted by law, — the method may be worked out 
in different ways, — has resulted in some marked 
gains for the group at the bottom of industry. 
In this country w^e are attempting to apply it 
simply to the working girls and helpless working 
women, the working girls and women who have 
to live on an income of five, and six, and eight 
dollars per w^eek. One of these working girls 
said: " If I spend more than seven cents for a 
lunch I think I am extravagant.'' Another said : 
" If I should spend thirty cents for a dinner, I 
don't know what w^ould happen, and,'' said she, 
'' I am tired to death of living on these twenty 
cent dinners." When I see men at the other end 
of society spending their two, three, four and 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 119 

five dollars for a dinner, I realise that we have a 
fundamental task here, imperative to the Chris- 
tian conscience, to adjust these differences. 
^ That will be conceded pretty generally now by 
the intelligent and humane management of in- 
dustry. I remember a man at the head of one 
of the great steel corporations of this country 
who was objecting very seriously to some of the 
proposals made for the betterment of the con- 
dition of the workingman. He said : " You are 
going to utterly disorganise the present condi- 
tions in the industrial world." But after a while 
he made this significant admission : '' I am will- 
ing to admit, however, that there is altogether too 
much difference between the life of the president 
of our corporation and the man who works in the 
mill and mine for us.'^ If that admission be 
made, it shows an imperative necessity for some 
sort of a change, and demands that we procure 
measures which will lessen that difference. 
While some employers of labour were at a meet- 
ing of an investigating commission stating that 
the working girl could live perfectly adequately 
on eight dollars per week, the executor of an 
estate was at the same time making application 
to a court for an increase in the income of the 
girl for whom it was held. He said that |12,000 
was not an adequate income for her and he re- 
quested that it be raised by |8,000. The kind 



120 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

court raised the income from |12,000 to |20,000 
a year. As long as you have some girls of six- 
teen years who must have |20,000 a year to live 
on^ you must have thousands of others who have 
got to get along on eight dollars a week. Some- 
thing must be done to bring relief from this 
obvious injustice. 

A defensive minimum wage measure has been 
put around the group down at the bottom. The 
principle is the thing which must be considered. 
The principle^ as given in the words of the an- 
cient Book^ is that the husbandman must be the 
first partaker of the fruits. Other rights that 
come in there must come in after that principle 
has been recognised and worked out. The first 
charge upon industry, from the standpoint of 
Christian ethics, is the adequate support of all 
those who are engaged in that industry. All 
other charges whatsoever come secondary to that. 
Now instead of conceding that principle, we are 
engaged in this country in disputing about the 
methods of applying it without regard to the 
cold facts. The facts are clear here and in Eng- 
land. They show that so far a defensive mini- 
mum wage law has raised the income of the 
lowest group in each industry, where it has been 
applied. In Australia and New Zealand the 
facts are still clearer, with a minimum wage 
established not by legislation but in each partic- 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 121 

ular industry by a wage board composed of 
workers and employers. That minimum wage 
so established has not only proved an adequate 
defence for the underfed, overworked group at 
the bottom but has resulted in a great uniform 
improvement for the wage-earning class and has 
also resulted profitably to the employer. 

These facts cannot be gainsaid, and therefore 
in this country we must come to realise imme- 
diately that the industry which pays less than a 
living wage is a parasitic industry, socially un- 
desirable, which the community cannot afford to 
maintain. It matters not whether the cause of 
that industry's paying less than a living wage 
is the greed of the management or the ineflflciency 
of the management, and it is one or the other, as 
your investigation in Massachusetts, by your 
Minimum Wage Commission shows. Whatever 
the cause, the community cannot afford to main- 
tain a greedy management or an absolutely 
inefficient management. The social results of 
the lack of a living wage, the results in disease, 
the results in inefficiency, the results in delin- 
quency — all burdens which the community has 
to carry — these social results are so great that 
the community is justified in saying to individ- 
uals: "We cannot permit you to manufac- 
ture such results as this along with your prof- 
its/^ 



1Q2 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



PROFIT SHARING 



The next step is the step of profit sharing. 
That is being increasingly tried in this country. 
It was remarkable to notice the unanimity with 
which the great industrial managers and the 
financial magnates testified to the Industrial 
Commission that profit-sharing was desirable 
and workable and the next step. The value of 
profit-sharing depends upon the kind of profit- 
sharing. There is one kind that has proved 
absolutely unsuccessful^ and it deserved to fail. 
It is not profit-sharing. It is one of the 
smoothest confidence games ever put over on an 
unsuspicious public^ and that is the profit- 
sharing which is nothing more or less than a 
bonus for increased production. If more capital 
is put into an industry, the charge on that capi- 
tal is taken out before the profits are deter- 
mined; if more management is put into it, the 
charge for that increased management is also 
taken out before profits are distributed. But not 
so with labour. The result is that without any 
increased charge for capital and with no in- 
creased charge for management, the management 
says : ^' If you will be kind enough to produce a 
certain amount more than you have been pro- 
ducing, we will be good enough to give you a 
certain part of it.'' All that is made is made 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 123 

absolutely by the workers and capital simply 
appropriates what it can of that and gives the 
rest of it as a bonus to the workers. Of course, 
that type of profit-sharing does not work out. It 
does not relieve the friction of the industrial 
procedure. It is often a deliberate attempt to 
take the workers away from the beneficial results 
of organisation and self-expression and to set up 
a substitute for organisation on the part of the 
workers. Concerning that attempt something 
severer needs to be said, for it is socially harm- 
ful. It involves certain results to society in fric- 
tion, in the denial of the natural self-develop- 
ment of the industrial group which are danger- 
ous to our social progress. 

But there is a type of profit-sharing which is 
eminently just and which has the proper spirit 
and method. That is the type of profit-sharing 
which approaches the whole situation not to get 
further profits by giving bonuses, but with a 
desire really to do justice, with a desire really to 
find out what labour has been contributing to 
the product which it has not been getting. And 
whenever any management in this country has 
put up a plan of profit-sharing with an attempt 
to do justice to co-workers, the results have been 
highly desirable, both for the individual industry 
and for society as a whole. It must involve not 
only an attempt to do justice and an attempt to 



1^4 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

discover what labour really produces; it must 
involve also the democratic spirit — the willing- 
ness to consult and co-operate with the wage 
earning group and give it a voice in the control 
of terms of labour. In your own city in one of 
your great stores, we have a genuine attempt 
toward a just and democratic profit-sharing plan. 
All such attempts as that are steps toward the 
ultimate goal. They are steps in a sound and 
healthful social progress and all who contribute 
to them deserve the thanks of society. 

IS THE WAGE SYSTEM FINAL? 

But is that final? Are we able to ameliorate 
the injustices of the present system by profit- 
sharing, by minimum wage laws for the group at 
the bottom, and collective bargaining on the part 
of organised labour? Is the wage system final? 
Is it the last thing in the division of the product 
of industry? Well, we might remember in pass- 
ing that there are few things that are final. The 
trouble with most folks is that they seem to think 
that the condition of life in which they happen 
to have been born and have grown up is eternal. 
The wage system is the essential feature in the 
capitalistic method of production and distribu- 
tion. But the capitalistic method is only a tem- 
porary phase of the world's industrial progress. 
And the wage system has this about it, — that it 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 195 

does not harmonise with our present democratic 
development. By it, the members of the employ- 
ing group determine arbitrarily their share of 
the joint product. This power is limited, of 
course, as labour gets the power to express itself. 
It is limited also by legislation. But in the main 
the central feature of the present wage system is 
that the employer can say how much his reward 
shall be within certain economic and industrial 
limits. It leaves that power there, and on the 
other hand he can also say very largely what the 
reward of those who work with him shall be. 
This is one reason why the wage system is stand- 
ing out to-day as inefficient and is admitted to be 
so by some of the large industrial managements 
in this country, and that is the reason for profit- 
sharing. The inefficiency lies essentially here, 
that the wage earner is not working for himself 
primarily but for somebody else. He does not 
know how much he is working for somebody 
else. The fact that he is working for somebody 
else is resulting in profit and gain, and he does 
not know to what extent, and that stings his 
sense of injustice. A man will work for others 
with more zeal than he will work for himself if 
he is working freely and voluntarily in the ser- 
vice of common good, but when he is working 
for some very limited group, for some few indi- 
viduals all the time, that very fact is working in 



196 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

a manner more or le^ effectively to make Mm an 
inefficient worker. 

Then the wage system is being challenged also 
because it is unscientific. Our economists are 
telling us that it is not a scientific method of 
determining the product of labour. There are 
more than fourteen different wage theories 
travelling around. Did you ever try to deter- 
mine what made wages ? Did you ever go into a 
community to determine why unskilled labour 
was getting §1.50 a day? The only answer I have 
ever gotten in my attempts to discover this was 
that somebody, years ago, hired some unskilled 
labour and on a rough estimate he started to pay 
|1.50 a day for that unskilled labour. That 
wage was adjusted to the necessities of that time. 
But because the labourer got fl.oO a day then, 
he is still getting it and he tries to live on it. 
Cases like that show why our present wage 
system is absolutely unscientific. This one case 
is an example of the fact that the wage system 
is very largely a gamble. It is a gamble both on 
the side of profit and of wages. The fact that 
it is a gamble makes many a capitalist go broke 
and leads many a worker into sorrow. It is 
more than a mere unscientific system because you 
are gambling with human life and that is some- 
thing which an ethical people cannot allow when 
it is not necessary. The intelligence of the scien- 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 127 

tiflc world refuses any longer to support an un- 
scientific system and demands that we shall , 
combine our powers of co-ordination. We will 
no longer send our ships out to sea and take a 
blind chance that the waters will be kind and 
bring the ship safely back into port ; we first find 
out what science has to say about the weather. 
So we must not send our workers into the indus- 
trial world to receive what the blind laws of 
supply and demand shall bring them. The in- 
telligence of the modern world must bring itself 
to this task. It is shocked by the idea that 
labour is a commodity to be bought and sold in 
the open market just the same as any other 
material, to be bought at the lowest price and 
sold at the highest. The contention of labour and 
the fundamental contention of the Carpenter is 
that life is never a commodity, that life is never 
a thing to be bought and sold. The conscience 
of mankind in answer to that teaching has for- 
ever swept out of the world chattel slavery and 
sometime it is going to sweep out of the world 
wage slavery. For when men must work under 
conditions to which they do not consent, when 
they must work under conditions which they 
abhor, that fact is a fact of slavery. When they 
are driven by necessity and hunger and by the 
organisation of life to work under conditions to 
which they do not consent and when those condi- 



1^ THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

tions might be removed and changed by a more 
intelligent organisation of the industrial system, 
that fact is a fact which cannot be consented to 
by the conscience that has been trained in the 
school of Jesus. 

There is something else here, in the wage 
system; there is a wrong relationship between 
the two parties concerned. They are trying to 
buy and sell labour, and the best you can do with 
collective bargaining is to put the two parties on 
a nearly equal basis of strength down behind the 
same table to determine the terms of the bargain. 
The result is either an armed truce, perhaps to 
the detriment of the rest of the community, or 
it is worked out on the same basis that all trade 
is carried on and the party who is the most 
skilled is the party which will take the advan- 
tage. " To the victor belong the spoils." It 
is a battle principle, and the ethics that Jesus 
taught insists that this is a wrong relationship 
between man and man. One whose eyes have 
been opened can never believe that the only ulti- 
mate settlement of this question is that two 
groups should sit around a table and see which is 
the stronger in driving the better bargain. The 
ethics of Jesus insists that men should sit down 
not as antagonists, not as bargain drivers, but as 
brothers, co-workers in the joint work of the 
world. When you put men into that funda- 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 1^9 

mental relationship, then they seek to do justice 
to each other and not to take advantage of 
each other. And the demand of Christian ethics 
is that ultimately all parties to the industrial 
process should be put in this relationship of 
trying to determine, not how each may take 
advantage of the other, but how best they all 
together may serve the common good, and be 
rewarded according to their service. 



130 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



Q. Is it possible to make any arrangement 
whereby capital can possibly receive an interest 
return generally of even two cents on the dollar? 

A. Practically that thing is being done all the 
time. Ethically, it is impossible. 

Q. Ought one to patronise Five and Ten Cent 
Stores in view of the wages paid their clerks? 

A. No man can be the guardian of another 
man's conscience, but anybody who has the kind 
of a conscience I have been talking about ought 
to keep away from all stores that are paying 
starvation wages. 

Q. If a man now earning |9 a week, with a 
family, should come to you for advice, this man 
being interested in social betterment, what would 
you advise him to do? 

A. I do not know anything that man can do 
except, on the one hand, to endeavour to increase 
his individual economic efficiency so that he may 
try and get a larger wage under the present 
system; and, on the other hand, to put all his 
power into the collective efforts of his fellow- 
workers to improve the general conditions. 

Q. Have not we too much education? 
Oughtn't we to have more intelligence and com- 
mon-sense? 

A. What we need is more common-sense edu- 
cation. 



THE DEMAND FOR INCOME 131 

Q. Would not the coming of the Millennium 
be hastened if your lectures were used as a text- 
book, with all references to the Bible cut out? 

A. Wellj I got the inspiration for my lectures 
out of the Bible. 

Q. Would it be advisable to merge the House 
and Senate into one legislative body and take 
away their income and use that income for the 
relief of the unemployed? 

A. I think we could even extend that proposi- 
tion and do without the services of a great many 
more of our so-called legislators for a while. 

Q. Is the money system and the wage system 
synonymous? What substitution would you 
give for money? 

A. They are not synonymous. Of course, I 
am in this fortunate position, that I do not have 
to suggest practical plans, but I have to inculcate 
principles and I leave the difficult parts of the 
job to somebody else, and I think the most prac- 
tical suggestion I have seen in a long w^hile in 
that direction is in a pamphlet, " The Mechanics 
of Socialism,'' which you can secure at the head- 
quarters of the Boston Fabian Club. 



VI. VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 

ANARCHISM OF VARIOUS KINDS 

The strongest criticism that is levied against the 
labour movement by those who are not in touch 
with it conceriis its use of violence. It is con- 
demned in the sacred name of law and order, and 
law and order are, of course, fundamental to any 
organised community. Usually the criticisms of 
labour concerning its violence re^t on two mis- 
conceptions. There still lingers in the minds of 
many people the mistaken notion that anarchism 
and socialism are, if not identical, at least con- 
nected. In the early days of the labour move- 
ment in Europe it was composed of a number of 
disconnected groups, and the policy was there- 
fore more or less chaotic. Among those groups 
there was the group of Terrorists who promoted 
the propaganda of the deed, and strange to say 
they achieved most success in Spain and in 
this country. But very soon two groups very 
different in tactics and philosophy crystallised 
and the struggle went on between them for the 
control of the labour movement. These groups 
were the anarchists and the Marxian socialists. 

13^ 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 133 

A renewal of that conflict is carried out in the 
recent development of syndicalism in Europe. 
Again the same battle has been fought ; again the 
victory has been with the socialist tactics, and 
the anarchist group in Europe are losing their 
latest battle. 

Another misconception that prevails is that 
organised labour is a sponsor of violence, attempt- 
ing to accomplish its ends by the use of physical 
force, particularly in its coercion of the non- 
union man. That is not the policy of the trade 
union movement of any country. All reputable 
leaders of the trade union movement not only 
disavow violence for public consumption, but 
sincerely and strongly oppose it within the 
labour movement. That this is an honest Judg- 
ment may be seen from the fact that violence 
decreases with the spread of labour organisa- 
tions. There is much less violence now than in 
the early days of the labour movement. There 
has always been more violence connected with 
spontaneous strikes of unorganised workers than 
with the strikes conducted by labour organisa- 
tions. In those countries where trade union 
organisations have grown to the largest strength, 
where they are recognised by the employers and 
by the courts, there is the least violence. In 
Australia and New Zealand where the belief in 
collective bargaining is very strong you find 



134 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

scarcely a trace of violence. In this country you 
will find violence strongest where trade unions 
are weakest; and in those trades w^here trade 
unions are the oldest^ where they have the most 
power, you will find, generally speaking, the least 
violence. You can take the coal mines: In 
those States where the operators recognise the 
rights of collective bargaining, you have a long 
history of the peaceful conduct of the coal mining 
industry, both to the advantage of the operators 
and the States. 

Now, notwithstanding all this, violence does 
occur in the labour movement, and violence is 
sometimes abvocated by local labour leaders. 
Where you have a policy of desperation owing to 
the break-down of organisation in a trade, where 
you have the desperate fighting of the rat in the 
corner, there you will find violence, as in the 
McNamara case. Aside from that exceptional 
case I know of no instance in the American 
labour movement when violence has been propa- 
gated by national union leaders. It is some- 
times fostered by local trade union leaders. 

There are some reasons why we have more 
sporadic violence in the United States than in 
other countries aside from the question of the 
individualistic nature of our government. One 
reason for that is the American spirit. We are 
law-makers and law-breakers beyond any other 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 135 

people on the face of the earth. As Kipling said 
when writing of the American spirit, first we 
make the law we flout, and then we flout the law 
we make. There is no one of us but what is 
breaking continually more or less the statutes 
that w^e know nothing about which are on our 
statute books, and that breeds a disrespect and 
even a contempt for the law. It goes further 
than that. We have the anarchist attitude of 
the officials who are sworn to enforce the laws 
and who do not enforce them but who continually 
before the eyes of the whole people violate their 
oath of office. It is not very long, is it, since in 
Boston a high official advocated, concerning the 
utterances of a man with whom he did not agree, 
that he should be run out of town? Now beside 
the anarchy of officials of the law, which is, of 
course, the very disruption of the State, labour is 
educated also into disrespect for the law by the 
attitude of capital toward the law. Labour sees 
capital making the law, and as labour goes more 
and more into political action it finds the capital- 
ist lobbies at the legislature and sees how they 
work. It even has seen the National Manufac- 
turers' Association operating at Washington, and 
the whole public has had opportunity to trace 
the reaching out of that influence over the very 
courts themselves. Capital is continually teach- 
ing labour to have little respect for the law. 



136 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

When capital does not control the making of the 
law, it hires its expensive attorneys to find means 
to evade the law. 

I am offering neither defence nor apology, but 
I am showing reasons, and if you want to stop 
violence in the labour movement and if you want 
to establish respect for the law the first step is 
to make capital keep the law; and, in my judg- 
ment, if you can make capital keep the law, the 
amount of trouble you will have from labour will 
be negligible. 

Now there are other more general reasons 
lying back of this situation. You can trace the 
development of violence in the world-wide labour 
movement according to a certain definite law. It 
proceeds in proportion to the tyranny of govern- 
ments, in proportion to the opposition of employ- 
ers to labour movements, and in proportion also 
to the ignorance, helplessness and desperation of 
the workers. There is a law that birds and 
animals throw out certain defensive weapons in 
response to certain needs of protection. And in 
the same way if we trace the world-wide develop- 
ment of the labour movement do we find these 
weapons of defence being thrown out in response 
to certain needs of protection. And the weapon 
of defence becomes before long the weapon of 
offence and aggression. The fundamental rea- 
son for what violence there is in the labour move- 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 137 

ment is because industry is yet organised on the 
war basis. All your local outbreaks are simply 
the outcome of the war spirit that lies at the cen- 
tre. As Lincoln said concerning the situation 
before the Civil War, ^^there is an irreconcilable 
antagonism at the heart of it.'' 

THE STRIKE AND THE " SCAB '' 

Now what about the local violence of the labour 
movement? What about the violence of strike 
conflicts? And it ought to be recognised of 
course, in passing, that no struggle for human 
rights has ever been won in history without vio- 
lence. That, again, is no apology, no defence, no 
justification. It is the statement of a fact, and 
along with that goes this other fact, that the 
rights for which labour is struggling are just as 
fundamental as any of the great civil rights for 
which men have struggled in the past and that 
so far that struggle for industrial justice and 
freedom has been accompanied by less violence 
than has the strife for political justice and civil 
freedom. 

There is, first, the violence against property, 
and second, the violence against person. The 
violence against property in a strike is of two 
kinds. It is that which is emotional, the mere 
outburst of passion and of mob spirit, that occurs 
when there has been an adequate reason of in jus- 



138 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

tice to stir the mob spirit. Such a thing as 
occurred here at Lawrence when the men opened 
their pay envelopes and found without note or 
warning that their wages had been cut. Such 
violence as occurred at a later stage in that strike, 
when the people who were trying to break the 
strike saw they could not make any headway 
against the peaceful picketing of the strikers, and 
as they marched around the building singing 
their songs they turned a stream of icy water 
from the hose upon them on that cold winter's 
day and thus created the violence w^hich gave 
them an excuse for bringing the militia to protect 
their property. A similar development of vio- 
lence you find in Colorado when there was vio- 
lence against the property of the mine owners 
after Ludlow and not before, after the miners 
had been wrought up to a pitch of frenzied hos- 
tility by the death of their women and their chiL 
dren and the destruction of their tent colonies. 

You also find some violence that is incited to- 
day, that is not emotional, but is produced by 
an educational process — produced by foolish 
speeches, speeches that often perhaps are not in- 
tended to produce that result. The syndicalist 
teaches a sabotage, which is to put the machine 
out of commission but must not destroy it. But 
the average worker on a low wage is not accus- 
tomed to philosophic statements; he is easily 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 139 

incited to destroy the machine after such teaching 
as that, and so you get a result that was not in- 
tended by the speaker but which is the natural re- 
sult of teaching doctrines which have a philo- 
sophic subtlety not to be comprehended by the 
people of the street. Then you have another kind 
of violence that is incited by capital, the destruc- 
tion of property that is done for the sake of put- 
ting the blame upon the workers. There was dy- 
namite planted in Lawrence for this purpose, and 
also in Los Angeles after the blowing up of the 
Times Building. I have myself in the last few 
weeks received positive first-hand evidence con- 
cerning one of the historic occasions in the labour 
movements of this country when property was de- 
stroyed, and in this instance life was taken with 
it. I have it right from men who paid to have it 
done that this violence was committed to have 
something to put over upon the labour organisa- 
tions before the courts. There is a regular busi- 
ness also of furnishing spies to become members 
of labour organisations. I have first-hand knowl- 
edge of that, too, and I have had the honour of be- 
ing reported upon by the spies that are main- 
tained in certain industrial corporations. You 
have the testimony before the Industrial Commis- 
sion, men admitting that they hired private detec- 
tives and paid them to work in their plants in or- 
der that they might spy on their fellow-workers. 



140 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Many of the deeds of violence in American labour 
struggles were done by those secret agents, and we 
need to understand their part in making bloody 
history. Nobody knows how large a part of the 
destruction charged to labour organisation should 
be charged to these spies. As for this whole spy 
business in American industry, I want here to 
record my deliberate conviction that those men 
who cannot manage industry without the use 
of spies have thereby proved their moral and in- 
dustrial unfitness to manage industry. 

Then, there is the violence against person that 
accompanies the strike. There are two kinds of 
this violence, the emotional outbreak of the mob 
and the deliberate policy of the educational com- 
mission to discourage the non-union man or the 
strike-breaker. Of course there is no such revul- 
sion against the use of a little physical force on 
the part of the men who are close to the funda- 
mentals of life as there is in the refined and edu- 
cated group. That needs to be taken into 
account. Labour uses a great deal of physical 
violence within its own family. Men who live 
close to the fundamentals of life, who pursue 
hazardous occupations, find that life counts but 
little, that capital and state care little about their 
lives. And you must remember that the refined 
and cultivated group perform their violence just 
as effectively, but in other ways. A labour man 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 141 

who does not want you to take his job may dis- 
courage you with fist, or the brick-bat, or a piece 
of lead-pipe ; but the capitalist who wants to take 
away your job comes up behind and slugs you 
over the head with a million dollars, but he slugs 
you just as effectively. You may get over the 
headache of the man who slugs you in the head, 
but your family will be a long time getting over 
the injury inflicted by the capitalist. Both sides 
here cannot see the other fellow fairly for the 
beam that is in their own eye. But some of us 
who are standing in an impartial attitude must 
see the thing as it is and must recognise that the 
violence of labour, open and brutal, and the vio- 
lence of capital, subtle and refined, are one and 
the same thing, that both alike are fundamentally 
wrong and that both can have no permanent part 
in a democratic industrial community. 

Of course you know of the violence of the mob 
spirit, when the mob chases the scab, and that is 
not anything separate from the general mob 
spirit. It does not matter what men chase, 
whether it is a rabbit or a man, if once they get 
started to chase anything they lose everything 
except mad passion. In labour struggles that 
mad passion belongs not simply to labour but 
to the whole community. You will find that the 
hatred of the scab extends far beyond the limits 
of the trade organisation. To the whole labour 



U2 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

group that man is a traitor. From their stand- 
point they view him just the same as the trade 
organisation views the price cutter or the pro- 
fessional organisation (doctors, lawyers, minis- 
ters, etc. ) regards the man who violates the rules 
of that profession. He is not simply a grafter 
from their point of view, but he is also a traitor, 
and a traitor in war-time. When war is in the 
atmosphere passion rises, and when you get war 
in an industrial community you get all the fever 
and passion of men rising to their height against 
this man who is a traitor in war-time. There is 
a group that is paid to break strikes, that expects 
to do it by fighting. And the whole community, 
the very children of the community, will join, in 
the spirit of persecution, against these traitors. 

But back of all that, is of course the spirit of 
coercion, and the ethics of labour justify coercion 
toward the undemocratic anarchistic individual, 
insists that social welfare as well as the good of 
the labour group justifies coercion toward him. 
The reasoning is sound and the ethics are correct, 
only when that is extended to the whole commun- 
ity, when the majority in the community are con- 
vinced of the right to use coercion toward any 
individuals who are promoting a socially harmful 
policy. That right of coercion does not exist in 
any minority in the community. It must first 
convince a majority. You have to deal with it in 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 143 

the whole industrial situation. You have coer- 
cion exerted against labour as well as on the 
behalf of labour, and if you are going to remove 
the spirit of coercion from one side of the labour 
question, you have to remove it from the other. 

THE "gunmen" 

Another great cause of violence in the organ- 
ised labour movement, especially in recent dis- 
putes, is the employment of the gunmen osten- 
sibly for protecting property, but really for the 
purpose of prolonging strikes. These gunmen 
are the death-ravens of the industrial battlefield. 
They have been used in Colorado and West Vir- 
ginia and New Jersey. But they found New 
Jersey different from Colorado and now they are 
in jail to answer for their apparently unprovoked 
attack on unarmed workers. The immediate 
cause of the extreme violence of recent labour dis- 
putes has been the brutality of these gunmen. 
From the history of these situations I have found 
that the first serious acts of violence were com- 
mitted by those men and led to corresponding 
acts of violence on the part of the labour group, 
against whom those first acts had been com- 
mitted. It was back in the 60's when this traffic 
began when Pinkerton started his famous detec- 
tive agency, and now there are a number of them, 
several hundreds of them, I think, about the coun- 



144 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

try, principally engaged in furnishing spies and 
guards and strike-breakers to industrial corpor- 
ations. One detective agency offers to furnish 
unlimited forces for |5 a day, with transporta- 
tion. This great business amounts to the supply- 
ing of private feudal armies to capital. It is a 
reversion to the old feudalistic policy when the 
barons had their private retainers. It was as late 
as 1826 that England finally replaced the private 
forces of the aristocracy with the civic and state 
police, and now here in this country we have re- 
verted to that feudalistic system. 

What is the history and character of the men? 
One of the greatest detectives of England is on 
record after investigating the thing in this coun- 
try as saying that 90 per cent, of these agencies 
are fraudulent. William J. Burns, who ought to 
know, says that as a class these agencies are the 
biggest lot of blackmailing thieves that ever went 
unwept to justice. Other testimony is on record 
by men who know concerning the character of the 
people who are enlisted in these private armies 
(and I have some first-hand knowledge of my own 
on that fact also) , that they are for the most part 
ex-convicts, criminals, and denizens of the slums, 
with a sprinkling, since the business has devel- 
oped into warfare on a general scale, of soldiers 
of fortune, ex-soldiers who fight anywhere under 
any flag for the sake of adventure. Their busi- 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 145 

ness is to commit assaults and even to kill union 
men. They are hired to protect property but 
they are used to break the strike, and that is what 
they sell themselves for. In Colorado and in 
West Virginia they planned attacks on the labour 
forces on the same scale as modern warfare. 
They even have been known time and time again 
to commit widespread violence in order on the 
one hand to maintain their own profitable job 
and on the other hand to discredit the strikers. 
This is true concerning the Colorado strikes and 
the railroad strikes of the 90's. In one case, at 
least, the testimony is clear that the violence was 
committed by the agents of these private detec- 
tive agencies, who even went so far as to identify 
themselves by a certain sign so that when the 
militia came into action they w^ould not suffer, 
but the strikers. I am talking history now and 
nobody's opinions. 

" This reprehensible system is responsible for 
much of the ill-feeling and the bad blood dis- 
played by the working class,'' says the Pennsyl- 
vania State Commission after the first outbreak 
occasioned by such agencies in the Homestead 
strike of 1892. Commission after commission and 
judge after judge have so expressed themselves 
in this country, yet that business still goes on and 
even extends itself, and the only shadow of excuse 
for it is, that property must be protected. In 



146 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

every other civilised State the protection of prop- 
erty is kept in the hands of the State and not in 
the hands of private forces maintained by private 
individuals. There is no safety for any of ns if 
that system is allowed to continue. It is an in- 
disputable spot of shame and disgrace upon 
American industrial history, and it is high time 
and more than time that this interstate com- 
merce in crime and death be absolutely and for- 
ever prohibited in this country. 

THE MILITIA 

But you say that then the militia must come 
in and the attitude of the workers towards the 
militia is no different than the attitude towards 
the gunmen. In Colorado when the militia first 
came in the strikers went to meet them with a 
brass band, thinking that the militia would pro- 
tect them from the brutality and criminality of 
the gunmen. Later their attitude changed en- 
tirely toward the militia. Faith in the militia is 
not simply destroyed, but the militia is becoming 
to be hated in the labour movement, because la- 
bour believes (and the records show), that in 
most cases the militia has been used not impar- 
tially to enforce the laws of the State but on the 
side of capital to break the strike. The testimony 
of a militia man who served out at Lawrence 
(and it is on record), is to the effect that they 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 14T 

went out there to protect property and to serve 
one side. He said : "It was so understood ; we 
accepted favours from one side and never a word 
was said to us concerning the rights of the other 
side/' That is almost inevitable when you re- 
member the social and official associations of the 
officers of the militia with the group of employ- 
ers. It takes a good man to save himself from 
being influenced by his friends. And with the 
best will in the world the militia usually drifts 
into the service of one side. In Colorado it even 
went so far as to enlist in the militia the gunmen 
who were being paid by the private operators. 

If that danger can be avoided, yet we still have 
this peril, the peril of martial law, which has be- 
come a bitter fact in this country. It began in 
Colorado in 1903. The state officials informed 
the operators that they could have the services of 
the militia if they would pay the expenses. 

The militia should be used to establish law and 
order if the need is there, but to put state troops 
at the services of one party to a conflict if they 
will pay the bill is another matter. The consti- 
tution of Colorado says that the military power 
must always be subordinate to the civil power. 
Out there this military force refused to obey the 
laws of the State. They denied the right of 
habeas corpus. They denied the right of free 
speech, and they made a mine manager official 



148 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

censor for the State of Colorado in that section at 
that time. Since then we have had martial law 
declared by military officers in Colorado and in 
West Virginia without any regard as to whether 
the facts justified martial law, for martial law 
under our constitution is only justified when the 
ciyil power is inoperatiye. But in each case they 
put martial law into operation arbitrarily and all 
the fundamental rights of American citizens, the 
rights for which blood has been shed in the past, 
were denied by military officers. You had men 
thrown into jail under sentence by military 
tribunals. You had other men thrown into jail 
without any charge of any kind brought against 
them and held in jail for months. Judge Cullen 
of the New York Supreme Court has said that if 
this process was to continue there was not a 
single right granted to the citizens of this country 
which they could enjoy and use. We are facing 
here the possibility of the yery breakdown of the 
republic. If you are to haye militarism express- 
ing itself at the centre of our industrial commun- 
ities, you haye no guarantee for the future of 
your republic. 

You ought to remember that sooner or later 
labour is going to haye the controlling yoice in 
the commonwealth, and I ask you this. What is 
going to happen in that day if labour has been 
taught by a process of military dictatorship that 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 149 

the constitutional rights of citizens can be super- 
seded by arbitrary authority? You say prop- 
erty must be protected by the State. It must be. 
Property must be protected. But there is not a 
case where I have not found that the destruction 
of property was preceded by something vastly 
more significant, the destruction of life. The de- 
struction of human life in the industrial world 
has been the occasion for the destruction of prop- 
erty. And is the state to maintain a brutal 
armed force, for the sake of men who have no re- 
gard for the vital human fabric of the State? 

When the State considers that its first duty, 
more fundamental even than the protection of 
property, is the protection of human life, it will 
not have to concern itself with the protection of 
property, for that will take care of itself. And 
the State that will develop itself constructively to 
protect and develop human life will not have to 
adopt repressive measures for the protection of 
property. That is the way out of the situation, 
and it is the only way out. In the last analysis 
neither the State nor industry can rest upon the 
constraint of force, and the attempt to use force 
by either side in the industrial struggle is a con- 
fession that justice and reason have not been 
tried, or will not avail. In the last analysis both 
industry and the State can rest on no other 
ground than the ground of reason. 



150 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



Q. What do you think of Dr. Eliot's definition 
of a strike-breaker? 

A. I think that Dr. Eliot, like a good many 
of the rest of us college professors, is talking 
about something he does not understand very 
well. 

Q. Would not the Swiss military order be 
worth having in this country? 

A. Well, if you have got to have any that 
would be perhaps the least objectionable. I do 
not think you have to have any in this country. 

Q. If the Socialist belief that property should 
be enjoyed by its products is logical, why should 
not the machine which is destroying life be de- 
stroyed? 

A. Both to-day and the other day I thought I 
made myself clear. If a machine is destroying 
folks that is not a reason for destroying the 
machine, but that is a reason for stopping the de- 
struction of the machine and harnessing it up 
to social welfare. 

Q. Can labour unions themselves offset the 
results of the acts of strike-breakers by them- 
selves organising a force? 

A. I was in a manufacturing town last year 
where during a strike twenty union men were 
held responsible for order and for the protection 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 151 

of property. There was no violence or destruc- 
tion of property in that town. 

Q. Can the speaker give us any information as 
to the influence of women as evidenced in Colo- 
rado? 

A. They did one thing. They compelled the 
putting of the situation up to Washington and 
the bringing in of the Federal troops to replace 
both the gunmen and the state police. 

Q. What part have the newspapers played in 
these industrial controversies? 

A. In several outstanding instances they have 
misled the public by reports that were untrue and 
by reports that were biassed and only half true, 
and the reason for that, of course, is the associa- 
tion of the news gathering agency locally with 
the employing groups. The news comes to the 
reporter from that side with which he is asso- 
ciated, and that is the side he turns out. 

Q. In view of the fact that a scab is himself a 
worker and supports himself and family, is it 
fair for the union to hold the scab as it does? 

A. If a man is consciously and deliberately 
putting his own self-interest, his own little com- 
fort up above the good of a whole group or a 
whole class, he is a traitor to the common good. 
It is not a question of his being a traitor to the 
union. 



152 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. If the law and the constitution are being 
used to destroy the rights of labour, why do you 
say that labour should regard the law and con- 
stitution? 

A. My statement was that the danger was that 
labour should come to disregard constitutional 
rights. Law can be used to defend labour. It 
can be used to defend the destruction of labour, 
but of course the fundamental rights of any group 
can only be worked out by itself. 

Q. I wonder if professors even think or remem- 
ber that their good salaries are often, and gener- 
ally come very largely, from the hand-labour of 
business men and manufacturers? I could show 
you that manufacturers have a hard time, with 
taxes increasing annually, and all kinds of 
troubles. Men do not do as much in eight hours 
as in nine. They always do the very least possi- 
ble and have no mercy on their employers. No 
fool manufacturer can make both ends meet. 
They require brains, real brains. Investigate a 
little and you will know more than you now do. 

A. If we were inclined to forget that first fact, 
we should be constantly reminded of it, and we 
are. But we remember this fact also. We re- 
member that the money that supports us comes 
not only from the managers of industry, but from 
the workers in industry. And we remember 
therefore that we are under obligations to both 



VIOLENCE AND ITS CAUSES 153 

of them, and God helping us will discharge that 
obligation to both of them to the best of our 
ability. I do have plenty of sympathy with the 
manufacturers. They have demands of labour 
on one side of them and the control of capital 
with its demands on the other side of them, and 
if we have any message for anybody we have a 
message for them, that they shall use all the 
powers they have in joining with labour in* trans- 
forming matters. In regard to men doing the 
least possible and having no mercy on their em- 
ployers, of course that man has investigated just 
his own business. He has not gone far enough. 
I have learned this to be a fundamental rule of 
life, whether it is in teaching or preaching or in 
industry, you get back from men the same atti- 
tude with which you face them. If you try to 
skin them, they will try to skin you, and if you 
try to treat them with justice and appreciation, 
they will respond in the same spirit to ^ou. 



VII. LABOR AND THE LAW 

This is not a technical discussion. It is simply 
an attempt to present broadly the case of labour 
against the law^ from the standpoint of an obser- 
ver who will be impartial if he can and who is 
entirely unversed in the subtlety of legal techni- 
calities. 

Labour's first contact with the law is usually 
at the business end of a policeman's club. It 
concerns the right to picket. The usual instruc- 
tions to pickets are that they shall proceed 
singly, or in pairs, with their hands in their 
pockets, shall keep moving and shall use nothing 
but speech. Well, the best of instructions are 
not always carried out, and while peaceful pick- 
eting is recognised by the courts and laws of a 
good many cities and states, picketing does, of 
course, often lead to disturbance, and that is 
where the law may properly step in. But in 
determining where the disturbance begins you 
have to look for it inside the zone of discretionary 
enforcement of the law at the hands of officials. 
Oftentimes the right of peaceful picketing is 
denied and violence is provoked by the police. 
In the city of Paterson in 1913 the local papers 

154, 



LABOR AND THE LAW 155 

which were bitterly opposed to both the strike 
and its leaders, admitted and even claimed with 
pride that there had been less violence in that 
strike than in any strike of its size in the history 
of this country. Yet there were during that 
strike 1200 arrests and 300 punishments for 
picketing, which led a more or less conservative 
New York journal to liken that prosecuting attor- 
ney and district judge to Jeffreys and his famous 
hanging sheriff. 

Now there are other groups interested in the 
arbitrary and unconstitutional exercise of police 
power. Those groups interested in moral reform 
constantly come against that obstacle, and it 
would be well for both them and labour if they 
Avould join forces and resist with equal vehe- 
mence the unconstitutional exercise of police 
authority. When the police in Chicago found 
that by mistake they had Miss Starr in jail for no 
crime at all but peaceful picketing they were in 
great haste to let her go. They found they had 
burned their fingers. But she would not be let 
go. And if the same treatment that is accorded 
to labour for peaceful picketing were accorded 
to people in what is sometimes erroneously sup- 
posed to be the higher walks of society, we should 
have a good many more disturbances than we 
now have. 

When labour appears in court it faces the same 



156 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

arbitrary use of prerogative, in this ease exer- 
cised by the judiciary. It faces the injunction; 
it faces the right of the judge to make the law, 
interpret the law and determine the punishment 
— the right which has been taken from the exec- 
utive and legal departments of the government 
and which cannot be allowed to remain in the 
judiciary branch of the government. Does any- 
body believe for a moment that a jury of their 
peers, fairly drawn, w^ould have sentenced 
Gompers and Mitchell to jail for publishing that 
" We don't patronise '^ list? And when one con- 
siders from what class of society judges come — 
with no imputation of their sincerity — when one 
considers that practically their whole associa- 
tions have been with one side of this labour con- 
troversy, what justice can you have when an 
injunction prerogative with the power to punish 
is left in the hands of the judge in labour cases? 
It may be legal etiquette to write injunctions in 
the office of the attorney for the plaintiff, but 
when that is done in labour cases the outcome 
works a great injustice for labour. The funda- 
mental principles of the English law, according 
to an authority of this city, is that the judge is 
simply the voice of the jury — (that is, in certain 
groups of cases) — that it is not his province to 
take out of the hands of the jury the fundamental 
disposition of the accused, and the attempt to 



LABOR AND THE LAW 15T 

assume that right is contrary to the development 
of English Civil and Criminal Procedure. That 
attempt must be strongly resisted by all lovers 
of liberty. The fundamental principle of the 
right to be tried by a jury of one's peers where 
one's life or liberty is held in peril through vio- 
lation of the law is a right which every other 
group, as much as labour, is interested in de- 
fending. 

When labour comes into court before a jury the 
trouble is it does not very often face a jury of its 
peers. Packed juries do exist. The attorney- 
general of the last administration made accusa- 
tion to the President concerning the activities of 
one of those private detective agencies in influenc- 
ing juries. Even where juries are honestly 
drawn, with the present class struggle and class 
conflict you do not always get a jury of your 
peers. That phrase had a distinct meaning when 
it originated in feudal times. Would a baron 
submit to trial by a jury of serfs? See what 
happened in the French Eevolution when the 
class that had long been subjected to class punish- 
ment got control of the courts and laws in their 
own hands. And those people who are interested 
now in days of class conflict and class struggle 
in administering the law from the standpoint of 
class interest might stop to remember what will 
happen, if that policy be persisted in, when cap- 



158 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

ital comes into court to be accused by a labour 
district attorney, to be tried by a labour judge, 
and sentenced by a labour jury. 

THE BOYCOTT 

Labour has a controversy with the law over the 
question of the boycott. Now the boycott is an 
ancient weapon. It was used in this country, in 
this State, by the Sons and Daughters of Liberty 
against British goods. It has been used by em- 
ployers against union labour. It has been used 
by trade associations against members who cut 
prices. I have even known it to be advocated 
against preachers. I have in my possession a 
copy of a letter by the secretary of one of the 
state manufacturers' associations in this country 
which calls upon its members to cease supporting 
preachers who talk against the interests of that 
association. There is the positive boycott, the 
boycott that is turned around and used the other 
way, the consumers' label and the union label 
which constrains its members to trade with one 
another. The boycott in the sense of its use by 
labour though usually means either a simple ab- 
stention from dealing with another member, and 
the endeavour to persuade others so to abstain. 
That is the primary boycott and it is usually held 
legal by our courts unless it involves violence. 
Then there is the secondary boycott which endeav- 



LABOR AND THE LAW 159 

ours to induce others to abstain from dealings 
with certain parties by using coercive or intim- 
idating measures, and that has usually been held 
illegal, although the Supreme Court of California 
declines to make any distinction between the 
primary and the secondary boycott unless the 
element of coercion comes in. England and Ger- 
many have long recognised the boycott as a legal 
privilege of trade unions. In this country the 
ground of action against the boycott as voiced 
by the United States Supreme Court in its 
decisions against the boycott, that is, such a boy- 
cott as was used in the Danbury Hatters' case, 
is that it publishes certain facts, to the detriment 
of the property or the good name of another per- 
son, and therefore the courts have held that the 
right of free speech and free press ought to be 
abridged. In one notorious case the dissenting 
judge voiced this opinion : He said, '' The court 
has no such power '- — that is, to abridge free 
speech and free press in order to protect property 
rights. — ^' It is a fact that practically all of the 
encroachment upon the rights of property up to 
date have been made by the courts themselves, 
the sworn defenders of the Constitution." And 
when we remember that no government has ever 
long survived the denial of the right of free 
speech and free press, if there is any of the spirit 
of '76 left in this country there will be some other 



160 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

people ready to go to jail along with labour in 
defence of those fundamental rights. 

You have a social question here as well as one 
that concerns the interests of labour. Suppose 
the facts which ought to be printed and spoken 
are facts which the public must know? Suppose 
they are facts concerning the adulteration of food 
or fabric? Suppose they are facts concerning 
the destruction of the very fabric of society, the 
injury of the life of the workers? Must not the 
public know those facts? Is not such knowledge 
superior to any injury which might accrue to the 
property or reputation of those who have been 
doing this to the injury of the commonwealth? 
And those who care for a safe and sound social 
progress will defend here the right of publication 
in the proper manner of all facts which are 
socially necessary to be known. 

It has been found in England and Germany 
that the use of the boycott has diminished with 
its legalising. The same result would surely 
follow in this country. If it be not legalised, it 
will be used secretly in a much more dangerous 
fashion, even as the black-list is used. The black- 
list is permitted by law even more than the boy- 
cott, and yet the black-list is used more fre- 
quently in this country than the boycott is used. 
The white-list can be used just as effectively. 
Labour recognises the possibilities of the unjust 



LABOR AND THE LAW 101 

use of the boycott in righting injustice, and its 
leaders have spoken against its unjust use. 
There have been few cases in recent industrial 
uses where it has been used for any other reason 
than to right injustice. In one case where a per- 
son was boycotted the trade of the person 
attacked was increased rather than diminished 
by the unjust and unfair use of the boycott. The 
abuse of the boycott can be met and suppressed 
under the existing criminal law. And if it be 
legalised in a proper manner it will result in a 
much better type of industrial struggle than will 
prevail under its suppression. 

CONSPIRACY 

The boycott like many other labor measures is 
sometimes proceeded against on the ground of 
conspiracy, and here again is labour's contro- 
versy with the law. The common law against 
conspiracy was used in England originally 
against all labour organisations. They were 
held to be unlawful, but in 1875 England legal- 
ised trade unions and took them out from under 
the conspiracy laws. But in this country we 
have still persisted in the doctrine that an act 
which is lawful when performed by one individ- 
ual becomes unlawful when performed by a group 
acting in a concerted manner. Several States 
have modified the common law conspiracy doc- 



169 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

trine in relation to labour organisations. Yet 
when two States have by statute declared that 
offences not indictable singly are not indictable 
when done in concert, there have been recent 
attempts to extend the law of conspiracy. It has 
been so extended in the recent decision in the 
Danbury Hatters' case notwithstanding the fact 
that the records at Washington show that it was 
the purpose of those who drew that law that it 
should not apply to labour organisations. In 
West Virginia and in Colorado indictments have 
been drawn against the officers of the United 
Miners for conspiracy in restraint of trade. But 
the most daring attempt to extend the law of 
conspiracy to labour is in a recent case in Texas 
where some I. W. W. men were tried on a con- 
spiracy charge because of a riot which grew out 
of some speeches which some of them had made 
while others had not been present at the meetings. 
The prosecuting attorney took the ground that 
the law of conspiracy held a man responsible for 
acts done by an organisation to which he be- 
longed even though he was not present when they 
were done, and even though they were contrary to 
the expressed purpose of the organisation for 
which he had joined it. A part of labour's case 
against the court is that justice sometimes de- 
pends upon whether you have money to defend 
you or not. Those men who were tried in that 



LABOR AND THE LAW 163 

case had no money for a lawyer and so the prose- 
cuting attorney got by with his charge and they 
were given, I think, fifteen or eighteen years each. 
But when the next group came into the court 
their fellow-workers had provided for a lawyer. 
Those men went to jail for three and six months. 
Now the legal mind will have hard work to 
convince the common-sense mind that things 
which are right when done singly are wrong when 
done collectively. That is simply an outworn 
theory of a purely feudalistic period of civilisa- 
tion. To-day group action, collective action, is 
compulsory, and the question which has been 
raised by one of our labour journals concerning 
the recent attempt to extend the law of conspir- 
acy needs to be answered. " What about the con- 
spiracy of those who thus conspire to use the law 
of conspiracy? '' Those who are trying to limit 
collective action, to administer the laws of earlier 
and simpler days so as to check and hinder proper 
action for the improvement of social conditions, 
are not simply conspiring to persecute and 
oppress labour, they are interfering with the 
proper development of social progress. And the 
peril of their course is that if approved and per- 
sisted in by those who have their hands upon the 
laws and the courts, it leaves as the only avail- 
able method to remove the obstruction, the unde- 
sirable method of physical force. 



164 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 



FREEDOM OF CONTRACT 



Labour's next controversy with the law con- 
cerns the ancient doctrine of freedom of contract, 
and that is, of course, the chief bar to the enforce- 
ment of labour legislation. The doctrine of free- 
dom of contract has been used to nullify labour 
laws in State after State. It has been used to 
nullify laws prohibiting company stores. It has 
been used to throw out laws protecting the health 
of Vomen from over-labour. On that ground a 
law prohibiting the night work of women, which 
has been prohibited in Europe for years, was de- 
clared unconstitutional in New York State. It 
has been used to declare unconstitutional laws 
for the health of the workers, " safety -first laws,'^ 
and also employers' liability laws. All these 
have been checked in this country, hindered and 
held back by this doctrine of freedom of con- 
tract. In the State of Illinois, regarding the 
second ten-hour law there, two working women 
came into court to indicate that the law forbid- 
ding them to work more than ten hours was un- 
constitutional. One testified that she had 
worked for a certain firm, which of course really 
brought the suit, for thirty-two years, and after 
thirty-two years of labour (and she was the most 
efficient worker in the room), she could not earn 
enough to support herself and sister without 



LABOR AND THE LAW 165 

working more than ten hours a day. Freedom of 
contract might be constitutional if it simply 
meant freedom to destroy one's self^ but freedom, 
in the doing of that, to destroy a whole labour 
group is impossible. There is now a case before 
the Supreme Court of the United States trying to 
declare unconstitutional the minimum wage law 
in the State of Oregon on the doctrine of freedom 
of contract, and the plaintiffs advance the novel 
statement that low wages have nothing whatever 
to do with health and morals. 

This doctrine of freedom of contract is written 
into our Constitution, but the Constitution of the 
United States was written at a time when the 
whole civilised world was reacting against feud- 
alism, when the swing of the pendulum had car- 
ried both law and philosophy to the most absurd 
extreme of individualism, when even preachers 
were holding that it was too bad that children 
should be destroyed in the factories, but that all 
you could do was to pray the good God to take 
them out of life as quickly as possible. And in 
addition to the reaction of Europe against the 
constraint of feudalism we had the pioneer spirit 
here reacting against the suppressions of the 
Colonial period. At that time in this country, 
and at the very time when industrialism was 
forcing Europe away from the laissez faire phil- 
osophy, at that time freedom of contract was 



166 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

rigidly written into constitutional form here. 
But what was then a philosophic doctrine is ab- 
solutely contrary now to economic fact. There 
is no freedom of contract to-day for the individ- 
ual worker in those industries which are highly 
capitalised and concentrated. Freedom of con- 
tract is purely a legal fiction to-day. As Mrs. 
Robins says, " Every one, except judges and 
lawyers, knows that freedom of contract can exist 
only between parties on an economic equality.'' 
As long as you have economic inequality, you 
have economic restraint. Economic restraint is 
a fact, and it is more powerful to-day in certain 
groups of society than any other kind of re- 
straint. Now you can lessen that economic re- 
straint by legal restraint, and when you lessen 
economic restraint by legal restraint instead of 
interfering with freedom of contract you are giv- 
ing a direct expression of freedom of contract and 
individual liberty. It is shown both in matters 
of short hour legislation and liability legislation, 
in the doctrine of the interference of the police 
power for social welfare that freedom of contract 
is thoroughly established now in the courts. 
Economic restraint received its death blow with 
the United States Supreme Court decision con- 
cerning the ten hour law in Oregon, and since 
then we have had decision of state courts on short 
hour legislation, which simply shot that old doc- 



LABOR AND THE LAW 167 

trine so full of holes that nobody but a corpora- 
tion lawyer can recognise it. It must be recog- 
nised that freedom of contract, individual liberty, 
is subordinate to social welfare and that only by 
so subordinating it can you attain the highest de- 
gree of individual freedom and liberty. 

PROPERTY RIGHTS VS. HUMAN RIGHTS 

The question of freedom of contract bridges 
into still another question, and that is the ques- 
tion of the whole legal status of property, the 
comparative status before the law of human 
rights and property rights. Labour's funda- 
mental case against the law is not so much with 
the administration and interpretation of the law 
as it is with the law itself. We may have to deal 
with ancient judges still holding to outworn phil- 
osophy, but that is not the significant situation. 
We may have to deal with judge-made laws at 
the hands of judges whose whole association and 
whose whole sympathies have been with the capi- 
talist and the employing group rather than with 
the labour group, and who notwithstanding all 
their sincerity and honesty are nevertheless in- 
fluenced by their associations and their sympa- 
thies as well as by their ignorance of the facts of 
the situation. But we have something more 
fundamental still. There is a different status be- 
fore the court in most cases for property than for 



16S THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

human rights. That appears over and over 
again. As one of our legal authorities has said, 
^^the legal attitude toward pressure exerted by 
business corporations for familiar ends of ac- 
quisition is very different from that toT>rard press- 
ure exerted by the union for the novel end of a 
standard of living/' 

So far the courts have held the right of free 
speech as less important than property rights. 
In other words, the life of the worker who is try- 
ing to protect himself by publishing certain facts 
counts for less with the court than the right of 
property to protect itself. The extreme of that, 
of course, was the decision in New York render- 
ing unconstitutional the workmen's compensa- 
tion law on the ground that it was taking away 
the property of the employer without due process 
of law. The Constitution says that no man's life, 
liberty, or property shall be destroyed without 
due process of law, and yet in all the decisions of 
the courts there is no instance where that clause 
in the Constitution has been invoked to protect 
the life and liberty of the worker. Take that sit- 
uation, which is simply a survival of feudalistic 
times, where the governor can himself call out the 
troops and declare a state of military law. Do 
you know where that most vital, that most su- 
preme of all powers, do you know a case where 



LABOR AND THE LAW 169 

that has been used to protect the life and liberty 
of the workers? It has been used sometimes, as 
it must be used, to protect property. There have 
been cases where the life and liberty of the work- 
ers has been just as vitally injured as ever the 
property of the employers was and that supreme 
authority has never been used to protect it. 

Come down to a concrete case and you get the 
same thing in more outstanding form. Here is a 
man over in New York who wrecks a business and 
along with it wrecks the savings of his employes, 
and he gets what — a fine, was it not? Here is 
a man in California who steals a dollar and he 
has gone to jail for five years for it. Now it isn't 
any use inveighing against the judge of the court, 
it is something fundamentally wrong with the 
law here that we have to deal with. It is the very 
conception of the law itself. Here are some 
workers out in a Western State who deported 
some people whom they thought undesirable citi- 
zens,' and they have gone to jail for kidnapping. 
But there are cases right here where employers 
have deported by physical force labour leaders 
whom they considered undesirable citizens, but 
they have not been found guilty of kidnapping 
and I have not seen the legal process invoked to 
that end. The United States government used 
all the power at its command (as it properly 



170 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

should have used it), in hunting down everybody 
concerned with that conspiracy of violence that 
was concocted at Indianapolis in the Structural 
Iron Workers' Union and the packed juries of 
Colorado (the evidence is before the commission, 
it is not my word you have to take for it, that 
there were packed juries in Colorado just the 
same as the packed grand jury of Calumet) have 
been indicting labour leader after labour leader 
for violence and conspiracy and so discrediting 
them before the whole public, but I have not seen 
the machinery of the law, either state or Federal, 
called into action to hunt down and trace out 
those who planned the conspiracy of violence and 
assault upon the miners of Colorado. 

This fundamental difference before the law is 
responsible almost entirely for labour's attitude 
toward the law, and the peril of the situation is 
that the attitude increasingly becomes one of dis- 
trust and hostility. In a Western state an I. W. 
W. leader was before the court for contempt, on 
the charge that on the street he had made a 
speech and said, " To hell with the court and the 
judge." He came into court and the judge asked 
him if he wanted a lawyer. He said, "No, it 
would not be any use. You will do what you 
want to, anyway." At the end of the procedure 
the judge asked him, "Have you anything to 
say? " He said, " Yes, I have one thing to say. 



LABOR AND THE LAW 171 

Judge, I did not say on the street, ' To hell with 
the court ! ^ The police testimony was all there 
was and the policeman lied, but/' he said, " before 
you sentence me I want to stand up and say here 
before the press. To hell with such a court ! " 

Now the peril of that goes far. That spells 
menace for the future, and it is not, I repeat, the 
case of individual judges or individual courts, it 
is the case of the status of property as compared 
with life and labour before the court. It is the 
proposition that a great part of our law has been 
written to protect the property of the strong, who 
got it by force originally, whose only original 
title was that of force, and who have been strong 
enough to write the law to protect that property. 
That is why the ex-chancellor of England, one of 
the best legal minds in the world, said a thing 
which sounds most extreme to Europe. He said, 
^' If I had my way I would hang all those respon- 
sible for the robbery of the property of other 
nations in the present war.'' He does not say 
a word about what he would do for those respon- 
sible for taking the millions of lives in this 
present war. It is your fundamental proposi- 
tion there that has to be changed. 

Now that status is going to be changed by one 
method or another, for the simple reason that the 
world is now coming to believe in a different 
philosophy of life. It has been believing that 



172 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

property was worth more than human rights, but 
it is learning now that humanity must ever stand 
supreme above property. It is coming to a 
philosophy of human values and human rights 
that was not taught by those who dress in purple 
and live in kings' houses, not by those who court 
the favours of emperors and have the privileges 
of the rich, but the philosophy that was taught 
by one who worked with His hands. And the 
world that is coming to believe in that philosophy 
is going to change its law and its custom until 
the battle between the man and the dollar is won 
in favour of the man. The law which is more 
tender to property interest than to human rights 
is a reflection of an aristocratic state, a state of 
class privilege. It is a reflection, moreover, of 
the militaristic mind of that state which holds 
the great common crowd of folk subordinate to 
the group of luxury. But now we are creating a 
different kind of state, a state that never will 
enthrone a superior class in comfort and luxury 
with an inferior class at the bottom, a state that 
is organising its whole force and its whole life 
for the development of all its people on terms of 
equal opportunity. In such a state law will have 
this for its supreme function — it will be the ex- 
pression of the will of the people to restrain those 
who would injure or destroy the vital property of 



LABOR AND THE LAW 173 

the state — the lives and welfare of the people 
who make the state and all its property, and 
without whom neither the state nor property has 
any meaning or existence. 



174 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. Is not highly paid labour wages taken from 
the unskilled and unorganised labourer? 

A. Only in part. It comes from a number of 
other sources, too. 

Q. Does not the recall of judges and the recall 
of decisions follow logically from your statement 
of to-day? 

A. It does. In a democracy the supreme 
power must always be the will of the people. 

Q. Does not the hope of labour's future depend 
upon the fact that they are developing a litera- 
ture of their own? 

A. It does very largely. The fact that labour 
is learning to think indicates that it is gaining 
capacity for action, but labour's literature must 
not be isolated from the currents of the world's 
intellectual life. 

Q. Does not, in the last analysis, the police 
power of the State rest upon the working man 
inasmuch as it is the power of the people? 

A. The police power of the State is, of course, 
the power of the majority, and if the working 
man is the majority, that is his power. 

Q. If a workingman is called to serve upon a 
jury, should not he look at the case from the 
standpoint of the working class alone? 

A. That is just the kind of dose you have been 
getting from the capitalist, and it won't do you 



LABOR AND THE LAW 175 

any good to turn that dose around. Look at 
everything from the standpoint of the widest 
social interest. 

Q. The Constitution is a class document, and 
being a class document must it not be necessarily 
thrown overboard so far as economic law is con- 
cerned? 

A. The Constitution was to a certain extent a 
class document, and it becomes more and more so 
as class distinctions deepen, and so far as what 
shall be done with it is concerned, I think the 
world will not stop because we tear a parchment 
more or less. 

Q. Do you still advise us to obey the law, or 
are we to join with the man who said, " To hell 
with the law''? 

A. It is a very different thing to take a gen- 
eral attitude toward all law and all courts and to 
refuse to obey an unjust court and an unjust law. 
I would never advise any man to obey any law or 
any court which he believed to be unjust. 

Q. Is it not true that if you have recall of 
judges it will be the recall of the majority, and 
that there is danger in the fact that sometimes 
majorities are in the wrong? 

A. We are always in danger as long as we are 
alive. The danger of the majority is offset in 
this way, that the minority can always become a 
majority. 



176 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. Is it not true that in labour cases Massa- 
cliusetts decisions are superior in many ways to 
those of many other States? 

A. I am not a la^^yer and cannot speak with 
authority. However, I believe that the laws and 
the courts of Massachusetts have been, on the 
whole, more fair to labour than those of any other 
State. 

Q. Is it not true that many of the justices of 
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts rose from 
the labour class? 

A. Of that fact I have no knowledge, but in 
determining the sympathies of the person, that is, 
determining his attitude towards a class ques- 
tion, it is a matter not of income nor birth al- 
ways; it is a matter of one's psychological and 
ethical point of view that determines the thing. 

Q. Has the Governor of this State or any other 
State the moral right to summon the militia to 
protect property? 

A. He has that right. 

Q. I would ask the lecturer if he desired to 
give the impression that he was opposed to giving 
such a prerogative to the Governor of the State 
of Massachusetts? 

A. I am opposed in a democracy, which is the 
only kind of government I believe in, to give such 
an authority to any individual. 



LABOR AND THE LAW 177 

Q. To whom would he give that right in case 
of absolute necessity? 

A. I would have that right determined by a 
majority of the community where the conditions 
exist. 



VIII. DEMOCRACy AND INDUSTRY 

There are plenty of people who think there is 
no need to have a commission to discover the 
causes of industrial unrest. They are quite sure 
that they know them. There are some folks who 
take refuge in the comfortable belief that indus- 
trial unrest is a manufactured product, turned 
out by a group of agitators. Unfortunately for 
that theory, industrial unrest appears usually 
ahead of the arrival of the agitator. The so- 
called agitator is really an effect and not a cause. 
Various types of labour organisations may con- 
tribute to industrial unrest, but they themselves 
are simply evidences and expressions of it. It 
is a thing that is social as well as industrial. 
You can find it existing in China and in Japan 
just as it does in England and in the United 
States, and if you think you can stop it by sup- 
pressing the agitators, you will find that even 
though you could smash every trade union, sweep 
the Socialist party out of the political field and 
consign all the I. W. W. speakers to darkest dun- 
geons, your industrial unrest would still persist 
with the same degree of spirit and force that it 
now persists. 

ITS 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 179 

There are some other folks who think that in- 
dustrial unrest is nothing more or less than the 
struggle of the group that is deprived of this 
world's goods to secure more comforts and some 
luxury. They believe, therefore, that industrial 
unrest can be assuaged by an increase of wages 
or an improvement of working conditions. Now 
while, of course, the first and fundamental de- 
mand of labour is for its due and just share in 
the material gain of civilisation, it is something 
more than that. It is a desire for self-expression. 
It is a desire to share not simply in the gains of 
civilisation, but in the control of civilisation. 
You can satisfy the desire for material gains and 
you will not by so doing stop industrial unrest. 
For what you are facing here is not the rumbling 
of individual stomachs which are hungry. It is 
the stirring of the soul of the race. And those 
who have been dealing so long with columns of 
figures that they have forgotten what the soul of 
man is like had better take heed of the fact that 
it is the soul of man and not his stomach that is 
stirring in this labour movement. 

When you see a widespread unrest in any 
period of human history instead of looking for 
particular causes you had better get down un- 
derneath the surface and see what is moving there 
to make the eruptions. At any time of wide- 
spread social unrest in human history you will 



180 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

always find underneath the surface the stirring 
of some great idea, of some supreme ideal that is 
coming to birth. The ideal that is stirring behind 
the industrial and social unrest of our age — and 
you cannot determine its cause adequately by 
treating it merely as industrial unrest — the 
ideal that is stirring down there is the ideal of 
democracy. It is that ideal of life which is the 
great contribution to history of that little and 
peculiar people that used to live in that little 
strip of land that runs up and down one side of 
the Mediterranean but who have since become 
citizens of the world, and have carried that idea 
and that ideal to the utmost corners of the earth. 
It is the idea which has always lain unexpressed 
in the mind of men. It is the ideal which has al- 
w^ays been nurtured down at the bottom of the 
human race and which has found its clearest and 
its loftiest expression in the mouth of the Work- 
ing Man of Galilee. For what is stirring here 
is his great teaching of the uttermost worth of 
the downmost man, — the truth that every life 
must count as one and no life must count as more 
than one. But that fundamental principle of the 
absolute and eternal worth of every individual 
personality is not democracy. If that be all you 
take out of the lips of the Carpenter in order to 
organise around it your political and industrial 
life, you have nothing whatever but individual- 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 181 

ism. If that is all you take, it will lead you, of 
course, into philosophic anarchism. But Jesus 
taught that the uttermost worth of that down- 
most man could only be realised as life was or- 
ganised in brotherhood for that purpose. Here 
is the fundamental principle of democracy, that 
life must be organised in brotherhood for the 
purpose of realising the eternal worth that be- 
longs to every individual soul. 

That principle has been slowly making its way 
in human history and it has been destroying all 
despotisms — despotisms of state and of church. 
It has made impossible feudal aristocracies along 
with despotic empires. It is making impossible 
all priestly hierarchies howsoever organised and 
in whatsoever terms concealed. Now that prin- 
ciple comes to make its way in the industrial 
world. That principle which has been express- 
ing itself so vitally and powerfully in the state 
and in religion is now confronted by. an industrial 
system that is organised on the same principle as 
the old aristocratic, despotic, militaristic state; 
namely, the principle of the right of the strong to 
rule and to use the weak to their advantage. 
And that is something more than a feudal work- 
shop. It means not simply a feudal workshop 
but an autocratic administration and organisa- 
tion of finance. It means that your whole indus- 
trial system from the labour of the handworker 



18^ THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

to the control of the common capital upon which 
life depends is in despotic hands. Industry is 
suffering just as much from boss rule in the con- 
trol of its financial system as it is from the 
despotic control of the worker in the workshop. 
What you have here is the absolute enthrone- 
ment of the despotic principle in industrial life 
and the w^hole stirring of industrial unrest is the 
rebellion of the democratic spirit against that 
despotic organisation of industry. In so far as 
it is the expression of the working men in the 
labour movement, it is the voice of their determ- 
ination to be captains of their own souls and 
masters of their own fates. It is the expression 
of their determination that no other man or 
group of men shall control or limit their lives. 
They have found themselves to count in the pres- 
ent industrial scheme of things quite often as 
nothing more or less than a thing that is bought 
and sold in the marketplace. They have found 
themselves counted simply as a number on a 
payroll, or reckoned merely as an item in a cost 
sheet, and now they are expressing their voice 
and their will in the great determination that 
every worker shall find the expression of his per- 
sonality in the place w^here he works. Men who 
have come to take place and part in the common- 
wealth, who have come to feel that they do count 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 183 

as one in the life of the state, are going here- 
after to count as one in the industrial world. 

INDUSTRIAL DESPOTISM AND ITS RESULTS 

Is there such a fact as industrial despotism in 
the United States? Can it be that in this land 
of freedom and liberty, in this country that has 
not simply shouted but shrieked democracy in 
the face and the ears of all the world, that here 
despotism still lingers? You have on record the 
determined opposition of those in control of some 
of our greatest industries to any organisation of 
labour whatsoever, and if that be not the funda- 
mental expression of the despotic principle, what 
is it? You have in the steel industry the record 
in sworn testimony before a commission that men 
have been discharged for forming any kind of 
organisation lest it should become a trade union. 
You have the record of men discharged for going 
as a committee to ask for such a thing as relief 
from seven day work. You have the record be- 
fore the Industrial Commission of the men who 
control the coal industry of Colorado refusing 
even the principle of a grievance committee, re- 
fusing even that elemental expression of the 
democratic principle, asserting in the face of 
modern democracy the absolute prerogative of 
despotic ownership and despotic control. You 



184 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

have your whole movement of the National Manu- 
facturers' Association, with its promoters pro- 
claiming their intention to rescue the country 
from bad unions and bad leadership and to es- 
tablish the fundamental principle of liberty in 
the open shop, organising time after time a closed 
shop against the workers. Then you have a good 
many common people repeating the same foolish 
cry, that the principle of trade unions is all right 
but the trouble is that it has such bad leadership. 
Now I want to ask if the people who use that 
logic are willing to apply it to capitalism? Be- 
cause what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the 
gander, and if the whole principle of trade union- 
ism is wrong because it has some bad men for its 
leaders sometimes, then by the same token there 
is plenty of evidence to prove that the whole sys- 
tem of capitalism is wrong for the same rea- 
son. 

You have something more than the opposition 
to labour organisations as the expression of the 
despotic principle in industry. You have the 
successful attempt to control the whole life of the 
worker, to control his whole social necessities. 
You have seen established private baronies, 
feudal baronies within the state. That they are 
sometimes benevolent baronies does not for the 
moment affect the issue. The issue is, that here 
you have the expression of the despotic principle. 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 185 

As one old Finnish striker put it out in Calumet 
last year. He said : 

'' It is this Avay. I work for the company, and 
my wife she must buy at the company store. My 
kid he must go to the company school, and my girl 
if she want a book she must go the company 
library. If I want me a bath I must go to the 
company bath house, and if my kid gets sick he 
must go to the company doctor. Now I go on 
strike. I get into a row. The company sherilffi 
arrests me and they put me in the company jail. 
They take me to court and the judge, he is a 
pretty good fellow, he say ^ You are alright. You 
can go,' but the company what do they do? They 
say, ^ We have not got him yet, but never mind, we 
fix him, we get his damn head pretty soon.^ Now 
I'm getting old. Pretty quick I die. And when 
I die I want to go to heaven. I hope so. But if 
the company own heaven I want to go to hell 
right quick.'' 

Out in Colorado it was something worse than 
that. It was not simply the attempt to benevol- 
ently control the life of the workers, but it was 
the actual control of all the civil and legal rights 
of the workers. There are coal camps out there 
where the very roa4 into the camp, the very high- 
way, is the property of the coal companies and 
no man comes and goes on that highway except 
at their will ; where they own the schoolhouse and 



186 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

the church, the store and the saloon, — every 
facility for the life of the worker ; where the only 
civil official in the camp is the paid employe of 
the corporation — he is both judge, jury and exe- 
cutor — and where anybody who does not meet 
with their approval is told to go down the canyon, 
and if they do not choose to go down the canyon 
they get beaten up or shot. Now that is all on 
record, in sworn testimony. It is a fact that we 
have had set up here in this United States ab- 
solute despotic control of industry. What is the 
reason that this despotic principle still lingers 
in the industrial world? It is the desperate at- 
tempt of some to cling to rights and privileges 
which the reason and conscience of mankind have 
decided do not belong to any one group of peo- 
ple, and labour in resisting such despotism is 
fighting not simply its own battle but it is fight- 
ing the battle for all of us. It is fighting the bat- 
tle for the common liberties and the common free- 
dom of all the people. For the attempt to retain 
despotic control and absolute prerogative and 
privilege goes out far beyond the control of the 
terms and conditions of labour. Those who 
maintain it see clearly that if labour pushes 
its power much farther in the way of securing ma- 
terial gains, it comes to the point where those 
material gains can only be secured at the cost of 
some diminution of profit. It is the clinging to 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 18T 

that special privilege, the despotic right of one 
group to individually determine what shall be 
its share of the common product of toil that is 
behind this repression of the organisation of la- 
bour. If the greater attempt to extend that same 
despotic control over the common interests of 
life, over the resources upon which all of us de- 
pend can succeed (and how near it comes to being 
done in this country there is evidence in plenty), 
if that can be done, the group that can do it in 
their taxing power upon the common wealth of 
the world, in their indirect control of the life and 
liberties of the people, have a power undreamed of 
by the empire makers of the past. 

The necessity is upon those who care anything 
for the principle of democracy to see clearly that 
in resisting despotic power in the workshop, la- 
bour is fighting a battle of freedom for the whole 
commonwealth. And if some of you think that 
those who speak and write on these questions are 
inclined to unduly favour the side of labour, you 
must remember this, that we are speaking im- 
personally, — if we can. We are speaking as Lin- 
coln spoke, and you remember his words. He 
said : " If it comes to a question between capital 
and labour, labour must take priority, because la- 
bour precedes capital and there is no capital with- 
out it.'' 

Now Lincoln was not talking in personal terms 



188 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

about groups of capitalists and groups of labour- 
ers. He was talking impersonally about two 
great social principles, about two great social 
forces, and the only sound public policy by wMch 
democracy can be maintained is that policy that 
Lincoln there enunciated, with prophetic insight 
at that time. In standing upon that ground we 
are resisting of course the divine rights of capi- 
tal, which have been claimed, for despotism al- 
ways claims divine rights. And it needs them, 
too. " Me and God -' is always the voice of the 
despot. But he will need something more than 
that before he can make headway against the 
worldwide ground-swell of the incoming tide of 
democracy, whether he be in government or indus- 
try. The divine right of capital, you know, has 
been publicly proclaimed in the United States. 
They do it in more refined language in these days. 
They have learned better. But it was publicly 
proclaimed. We were told, that the Almighty in 
his great wisdom had selected these men of su- 
perior intelligence and superior character as the 
guardians of the destinies of the rest. Well, if 
God did that He is blinder than justice is usually 
painted. The capitalistic mind expresses itself 
in more delicate and subtle terms these days. It 
does not offend so grossly the conscience and the 
reason of democracv, and let me sav that not all 
capitalists have the capitalistic mind by a long 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 189 

way and not all industrial managers have it. 
Somebody raised a question here yesterday as to 
whether some of the judges of Massachusetts had 
not come up from below. From my experience 
of industrial managers who have come up from 
below some of the hardest and most brutal oppres- 
sers of their fellowmen are those who came up 
from the bottom. And so when I speak of the 
capitalistic mind, I speak again impersonally. 
Its full fruitage is both arrogant and blasphe- 
mous in its claims of superior intelligence and 
knowledge and of its special privilege of alliance 
with the Almighty. When you get it in its worst 
form it says that workers are beasts of a different 
order, and it says the teachers and the preachers 
are silly dreamers who ought to be pushed out of 
the way of the practical men who know how the 
world ought to be run. 

Against that capitalistic mind, which is the 
stupidity of despotism, the world must and will 
make its headway into the land of reason and 
justice and brotherhood. What are the results 
of despotism in this country, industrially speak- 
ing? What are the fair fruits of industrial des- 
potism? Serfdom, first of all. The weak and 
the dependent fall into a condition of servility. 
I go sometimes to industrial plants in industrial 
communities where men are afraid to talk be- 
cause the shadow of fear hangs over them. And 



190 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

where you have that you have also corruption. 
There is where you have your spies, sometimes 
holding office in labour organisations, and where 
you have that at the bottom, clear up to the top 
you can find the poison of graft and corruption. 
Despotism never has been able to maintain itself 
in the world except by spies and corruptors. 
Then among the strong you get rebellion. Among 
the strong you get the only answer that inde- 
pendent men can make to despotism and espion- 
age, and of course you get the spirit of revolu- 
tion. You have always had it as the answer to 
despotism in all history, and if you want the real 
reason for such an outrage as the McNamara in- 
cident you have it as the last weapon against des- 
potism. And if you want the fundamental rea- 
son for Colorado, it is because the mine owners of 
Colorado absolutely denied the principle of de- 
mocracy. 

There are many contributing causes, on both 
sides, to the labour conflict, but the fundamental 
cause of the conflict is the denial of one of the 
inherent rights of mankind. And when you have 
that, what do you have? You do not have simply 
the hell of open warfare, but you have the hellish 
poison of hate brewing and coursing through the 
veins of the group at the bottom until you have 
an iron wedge driven through your community 
life, with men and women on both sides of it who 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 191 

have lost reason and faith and fraternity and who 
face each other with hatred and suspicion. How 
long will it be before Belgium forgets, and how 
long will it be before the workers forget Ludlow? 
Worse than all the brutal outrage of the conflict 
is the poison of hate that is left to run its way 
through generations yet to come. After that 
reckoning, you get on the other side inefficiency 
and finally degeneracy, for that is the price of 
despotism. Those who wield it perish by it. It 
destroys them. I go through those industries 
that have become despotic close corporations, and 
if that is what you call efficiency, then the less 
we have of it the better. What about the workers 
in what is perhaps the most despotically organ- 
ised industry in this country? What about the 
large group of workers that are w^orking twelve 
hours a day, and what about the social result of 
that in the body politic? What about the type 
of life that you find in those twelve hour com- 
munities? You will find that it is losing a large 
part of its productive efficiency. Because of the 
fact that it blocks the avenue of approach from 
the bottom^ it is making a dead level at the top 
and you are getting a mediocrity of management. 
Along with that you have the fact of friction in 
the industrial world because you have it split and 
divided there with suspicion and hatred. You 
can get efficiency out of despotism in a militaris- 



193 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

tic organisation of life, but in a democratic coun- 
try with a democratic people who rebel against 
despotic autocracy it is the most inefficient type 
of management possible. The result is that you 
get from such inefficiency in management corres- 
ponding inefficiency in life. Will you take that 
steel industry again, will you read the history of 
the steel families, and then will you tell me 
whether that type of industrial management has 
benefited the people w^ho used it? There is an- 
other evil. The spirit of despotism at the top 
breeds an answering despotism at the bottom. 
It takes the kindly, simple democratic spirit of 
the plain humble folk at the bottom and trans- 
forms that into the hellish likeness of its " bet- 
ters.'' The answer to the despotic claim of capi- 
tal, " This is ours. We own it and we will run 
it,'' is the despotic answer of labour. And that 
is the worst result that can come from it, for 
labour wants to remember that it cannot find the 
day of redemption by seeking power for itself. 
It is its own worst enemy in that process. The 
same demoralising and degenerating results 
which have followed despotism at the top will 
follow it when exercised at the bottom, and if 
labour would save its own soul and save the rest 
of us it must cling at any cost to the fundamental 
democratic principle. In the day of its power it 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 193 

must organise life not simply for the working 
class but for all the children of men. 

Mankind will have democracy. It will not see 
the fruits that it has gained in the state de- 
stroyed. It will not see the industrial despots 
control the state for their own ends, and religious 
freedom destroyed by the subtle control of intel- 
lectual processes by the militaristic powers of 
capital. We have got government of the people 
and for the people, and the essential industrial 
needs of the people shall yet be controlled by the 
people and for the people. 

METHODS OF INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 

The methods are first the democratic control of 
the local workshop, and for the best form of that 
you can take the old town meeting fashion of 
absolute publicity of everything for everybody 
concerned. The people w^ho are opposing trade 
unions have laid upon them the responsibility of 
offering something better, and until they do their 
sincerity is naturally in question. The next step 
after the democratic control of the workshop is 
the extension of that principle through the co- 
operative organisation of the local workshop. 
We have several in this country but co-operation 
develops slowly. We have only got democracy 
in the government after a long and slow pro- 



194 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

cess of education. The school house open and 
free was the first thing, and the next thing was 
the chance to gain experience through expression 
of political powers. And we shall only get in- 
dustrial democracy after a long and slow process. 
The first step will be through the actual control 
of workshops by the workers. The more all the 
workers continually and persistently take part 
in it the better is its contribution towards de- 
mocracy. The development of democracy in in- 
dustry will result in the elective control of in- 
dustry. It is not going to be possible to stop 
industrial democracy simply with joint agree- 
ments between two armed forces facing each 
other. That may be nothing but a truce between 
two despotisms from which the rest of the com- 
munity may have to suffer, such as a possible 
truce between those two controlling groups in 
Colorado. The only way you are going to stop 
that industrial anarchy out there ultimately is for 
the people to take hold of those coal mines and 
operate them for themselves. We are going to 
pass through a period of state socialism. Every 
civilised nation is tending in that direction, and 
experience and knowledge and co-operative power 
is growing among us. T\Tien the nations of the 
world come into the full consciousness of what 
can be done collectively in destruction, they are 
going to do the same thing that has been done in 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 195 

war-time over in Europe for the construction of 
a sound basis for everyday life. The chief func- 
tions of the state now are repressive, but slowly 
and surely we are going to remove the things that 
needed pressure. The two chief costs of the state 
to-day are war and crime, militarism and degen- 
eracy. Both of those are socially preventable 
and mankind is beginning to resolve that they 
shall be prevented. Then you will have no need 
for many of the present functions of the state. 
The state is going to consist in the co-operative 
action of all the people to carry on the necessary 
business of life and to develop the cultural aspects 
of life. That is going to be the type of state in 
the future. 

The dream of the later Syndicalists is some- 
thing more than a dream, it is a forecast of the 
process of social evolution. Absolute industrial 
and social democracy is the complete summation 
both of the ideals of the race and the social prog- 
ress of the race. And if this appears so far in 
the future that it seems to be enveloped in the 
mist, I say to you look back first into the past 
and see how far we have travelled. What a step 
is there between our present power of collective 
action in the modern state and the power of the 
nomadic clan. When you go back of that a still 
further step how far is it back to when the cave 
man slept with a cudgel at his side? And if we 



196 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

have gained so much in collective power how 
much more shall we not gain in the future ? How 
far have we journeyed since Jesus confronted 
Caesar and the principle of democracy took final 
issue with the principle of autocracy — and in 
that day, mind you, the family as well as the state 
was established on that despotic principle. The 
road that we have to go to reach the end of our 
dreams is shorter than the road that mankind has 
travelled. And what is more, in the past they 
plodded their weary way in darkness, but to-day 
the road — its course at least — lies plain before 
us and the tools for its making are here ready to 
our hand. " O ye of little faith and dull of 
heart ! '' The men who are making the world of 
to-morrow are the men who, both in the ranks of 
capital and of labour, are seeking for the demo- 
cratic method in industry. They are the path- 
makers. They are the trail-blazers. Those who 
put their feet on those first faint trails of indus- 
trial democracy are helping to make the great 
highways over which the millions of the future 
shall walk into the land of justice and righteous- 
ness, and that only will be the land of plenty. 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 197 



Q. In view of the conditions against them, can 
the working class be blamed for wasting their 
lives by drink and foolish living? 

A. I hold it to be not only the duty of the 
workingman and woman but of every other good 
citizen of the Brotherhood of Man that they shall 
make their lives the fittest possible lives that all 
their energies may be thrown into this great 
struggle. 

Q. You have based your addresses on the 
ethics of the Carpenter, do the preachers who are 
shouting for Billy Sunday base their position on 
the ethics of the Carpenter? 

A. Every man can speak only for himself, and 
I have no intention of passing judgment on any 
other man, but I want to express one of the deep- 
est convictions of my life, that the only effective 
way to get the great w^orking class of this coun- 
try to personally follow the Carpenter is to fol- 
low him in the fight for social justice. 

Q. Would you advise the support of the So- 
cialist party as it is to-day in carrying out your 
ideals as set forth in this course of lectures? 

A. I have seen so many things in the past 
about the alliance between church and state and 
its results that I must insist that that is a ques- 
tion which belongs only to the conscience of 
every individual man. 



198 THE LABOR MOVEMENT 

Q. Should we have more schools? 

A. What we need is not the education simply 
of men's minds, what we need is the education of 
all the capacities of men for the fullest possible 
kind of life. That is the kind of education we 
need. 

Q. Does the American working man lack co- 
operation? Is that the reason? 

A. It is, because o\\ang to our late economic 
development here the spirit of individualism 
lingers stronger here than it does in Europe. 

Q. I would ask the lecturer if during this 
course of lectures he is speaking as a teacher of 
ethics or as a socialist? 

A. I am speaking merely as a teacher of ethics. 

Q. Do you think that the trade unions stand 
in the way of democracy? 

A. There are some aspects of the union that 
do stand in the way of democracy, but no work- 
ing man of to-day ought to forget that the long 
battle of trade unionism for industrial democ- 
racy is entitled to the respect of every w^orking 
man in so far as it stands for democracy. 

Q. After all the unions have done for the work- 
ers how can you say they do not stand for de- 
mocracy? 

A. The speaker misquoted me. I said there 
were some aspects of the trade union that were 



DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY 199 

opposed to democracy, but that it stood funda- 
mentally for the principles of democracy. 

Q. Do you not think you have overdrawn the 
case in favour of the worker and against the 
capitalist? 

A. My answer would be the statement that I 
made in the course of the address, that I was 
talking not in personal terms but in impersonal 
terms. Of course, in the individual cases there 
is something different to be said on both sides. 

Q. Would these ethical ideals you have advo- 
cated be obtained more quickly by an internal 
revolution of the individual or the external revo- 
lution against industry? 

A. Those are two things which cannot be sep- 
arated. Society is an organic thing and indi- 
viduals are organically related to it. 

Q. Do you think that there would be a de- 
crease of violence in Boston if the police would 
take away guns and police clubs from the police? 

A. If the policeman realised that he was a 
social servant we should have a great deal less 
disturbance on our streets. 

Q. Would it not be possible for all people with 
the democratic idea to work in unison without 
action by the government? 

A. When the people get together they are the 
government. 



